Exposing Wounds: Traces of Trauma in Post-War Polish Photography

44 
 
śnią o ptakach [Children dream of birds] resembles a wire structure or mesh, or perhaps 
refractions of light on water [I.12]. The images in this series possess various degrees of 
legibility, often impeded by blurring and selective focus. Rather than looking outwards, 
they seem to direct the viewer inwards, towards the realm of the imagination. The art 
historian Lech Lechowicz has described these works as “dream images, freed from the 
rigours of logic, in which commonplace situations and ordinary objects present 
themselves in surprising configurations, sometimes with unusual clarity, transformed and 
strange.”
 37
 The result is a series of suggestive images that possess a “disturbing 
mysteriousness and intriguing strangeness,” and frustrate any attempt at conclusive 
identification [I.12; I.13; I.15-I.18].
38
 
While Dłubak’s images come close to abstraction, they are still rooted in reality. In Dzieci 
śnią o ptakach, what appear to be twists of wire or water reflections are in fact several 
blades of grass photographed in extreme, almost microscopic, close up, with a shallow 
depth of field. Throughout this series, Dłubak took familiar commonplace objects and 
rendered them decontextualised and unfamiliar through photographic techniques of 
foreshortening, careful framing and close-ups. Karolina Lewandowska distinguishes 
different categories of abstraction within the series: the first, photographs recorded by the 
camera on a scale similar to human vision but using shallow depth of field and varied 
focus to create forms that the eye would not usually chance upon; the second, 
photographs that show a reality inaccessible to the human eye, registering the objects in a 
new macro-scale.
39
 The photographs demonstrate a different approach to recording reality 
with a camera, using the apparatus to register a picture of the world that looks different to 
the way it is received by the human eye. The curator  ukasz Ronduda has drawn attention 
to Dłubak’s fascination with “penetrating aspects of reality not generally visible to human 
senses.”
40
  
The role of the camera in transmitting an image and mediating the way we see the world 
interested Dłubak. His photographs from the late 1940s testify to a two-fold fascination 
                                                      
37
 Lech Lechowicz, “Photography and Media in the Polish Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde. Historical 
Essays as Side-Notes to the Collection of the Bieńkowski Brothers,” in Fotoobrazy: gest plastyczny w 
fotografii ze zbiorów Dariusza i Krzysztofa Bieńkowskich ( ódź: Muzeum Szuki w  odzi, 2006), n.p. 
38
 Ibid. 
39
 Karolina Zi bińska-Lewandowska, “Praktyka Widzenia: Twórczość fotograficzna Zbigniewa Dłubaka w 
latach 1947 – 2000” (master’s thesis, Uniwersytet Warszawski, 2001), n.p. 
40
  ukasz Ronduda, Polish Art of the 70s (Warszawa: Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski, 
2009), 213. 

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45 
 
that what exists in nature can be recorded in the photograph; and also that which does not 
exist in reality can be registered on the photosensitive material. Driving Dłubak’s 
photographic activity was a self-acknowledged desire to show that the vision facilitated 
by photography “has so much altered the normal, banal views, such as the one we are 
used to, that it has created a new world.”
41
 Dłubak’s interest in transforming vision 
resonates with the ideas that the avant-garde Polish artist Władysław Strzemiński was 
developing. His Teoria widzenia [Theory of Vision] presented a series of articles, in 
which Strzemiński presented the history of art as the evolution of ways of seeing and the 
growth of visual awareness. He argued that our vision of the world, the way we look at 
things, changes as a result of historical, social and political conditions: “In the process of 
seeing it is not important what the eye seizes mechanically, but what man becomes aware 
of in his vision. Increased visual awareness thus reflects the process of human 
evolution.”
42
 
Later in 1948, Dłubak’s abstract photographs were exhibited in Kraków at the I Wystawa 
Sztuki Nowoczesnej [First Exhibition of Modern Art] which opened at the Palac Sztuki 
[Palace of Art] in December 1948 and featured important inter-war artists alongside the 
younger post-war generation. As well as exhibiting existing work, Dłubak had also been 
invited by the curator of the show, Tadeusz Kantor, to participate in the design of the 
exhibition. Kantor had in mind an ambitious installation concept: the viewer’s route 
through the exhibition was to be a journey, which began with each visitor passing through 
an instructive entrance gallery before they entered the main exhibition hall. For this room 
Dłubak created six large photographs which were mounted on blocks or plinths turning 
them into sculptural objects that obstructed the visitor’s path into the main hall, requiring 
visitors to walk between and around them. Dłubak’s images consisted of large-scale 
enlargements of everyday objects: a cross section of a cabbage head magnified several 
times; the inner mechanisms of a watch, a telescopic photograph of the stars and an X-ray 
of a human chest and lungs [I.14]. The photographs showed a reality transformed by the 
instruments of science: telescopes, microscopes, X-rays, demonstrating a new way of 
looking at the world made possible by the development of technology, particularly those 
                                                      
41
 Zbigniew Dłubak, interview with Jarosław Suchan, in I Wystawa Sztuki Nowoczesnej - 50 lat później 
[First Exhibition of Modern Art – 50 years later], exhibition catalogue, (Kraków: Galerii Starmach, 1998), 
21.   
42
 Władysław Strzeminski, Teoria widzenia [Theory of Vision] (Krakow, 1958), 15. This text was not 
officially published until 1957, but it had been written in 1948 and circulated among artists. Dłubak had 
links with Strzemiński after inviting him to collaborate on projects for KMAiN. 

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