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

16 
 
Young’s study of monuments to the Holocaust has proved helpful. His discussion of 
‘anti-monuments’ seeks to elaborate alternative ways in which remembrance can be 
activated and sustained. His analysis suggests to me that traces of memory, or indeed 
trauma, do not always accumulate in the most obvious of places.
24
 Iversen’s collection of 
essays, Beyond Pleasure (2007) deeply influenced my engagement with the medium of 
photography. Two essays in particular have long stayed with me: a chapter which used 
texts by Freud and Lacan to articulate the interweaving of indexicality and trauma in the 
photograph, formative to the development of this thesis; and a discussion of Maya Lin’s 
Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. Iversen suggested that this structure did not 
function as a typical monument, disavowing loss in the form of a fetish, but rather 
encouraged an active engagement with the past through the “shadowy revenants” 
projected by the bodies of visitors on to its smooth dark surface.
25
 Pollock offers a 
feminist contribution to trauma studies, which is an approach that I do not prioritise here, 
but in After-affects, after images (2013), Pollock raises interesting questions as to how 
artists process traces of personal and historical traumas, and how viewers arriving at an 
artwork may encounter these traces and seek to transform them.
26
 Marianne Hirsch’s 
articulation of intergenerational trauma, interweaving theory, criticism and 
autobiography, has been particularly useful for analysing the photographs made by a 
second generation of Polish artists after the war. It has also emboldened me to 
acknowledge my personal connection to the topic of this thesis, to acknowledge the 
traumas I have inherited through my own family history and to understand how this 
history has influenced choices I have made in selecting work for this thesis. Collectively, 
the above mentioned literature have inspired me to recognise and articulate the traces of 
trauma in post-war Polish art photography. I also draw on the semiotic theories of Charles 
Sanders Peirce in my discussion of photographic indexicality.
27
 Where relevant I also 
                                                                                                                                                               
Spitzer (Hanover: University Press of  New England, 1999), 8; Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: 
Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (Spring 
2001), 5-37.  
24
 James E. Young, "Between History and Memory: The Voice of the Eyewitness," in Witness and Memory: 
The Discourse of Trauma, eds. Ana Douglass and Thomas A. Vogler (New York: Routledge, 2003), 275-
283. 
25
 Margaret Iversen, Beyond Pleasure: Barthes, Freud and Lacan (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State Press, 
2007), 132.   
26
 Griselda Pollock, After-affects, after images: Trauma and aesthetic transformation in the virtual feminist 
museum (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). 
27
 See Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 2, eds., Charles Hartshorne and 
Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958); Charles S. Peirce, Writings of Charles S. Peirce, 
A Chronological Edition, vol. 2, eds., Peirce Edition Project (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1982).  

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17 
 
draw on disciplines outside of art history, taking inspiration from literature, poetry and 
film theory to supplement my discussion. 
Much of what I write in the following chapters is directly related to the traumatic events 
of the Second World War. Yet the actual events of those years barely feature in my 
analysis, as my concern is rather the imprints those events have left on the minds of those 
who survived the war and the generations that followed. The events of 1939 to 1945 were 
not the only traumas to have cast their shadow on the Polish psyche. In my analysis, I 
suggest that multiple traumas can be discerned, overlapping and accumulating, in the 
decades that followed. Events in the present can trigger and reactivate earlier traumatic 
traces imprinted on the mind, with the original trauma experienced retroactively. The 
renegotiation of Polish borders at the 1945 Yalta conference reactivated historical 
traumas surrounding Poland’s long contested statehood and difficulties faced in guarding 
its geographical territory.
28
  The wounds inflicted at Yalta were slow to heal in other 
ways. At the conference, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin sanctioned the formation of a 
Provisional Government of National Unity in Poland, which allowed for the inclusion of 
communists and all but ensured Soviet colonisation of a newly re-established Poland. The 
years that followed were characterised by ongoing manifestations of violence and 
oppression, a “long duress of trauma.”
29
 Rather than single, unexpected, catastrophic 
event, Polish citizens under Soviet rule endured a long period of chronic suffering.  
Kantor described these years as an “inhuman epoch;” the horrors of war followed by “a 
half century when power was exercised with utter primitivism by people bearing the 
untouchable title of 'First Secretary', while the whole civilised world looked on with 
absolute indifference.”
30
  
For this reason, I have not limited my investigation to the immediate post war years but 
have extended my timeframe to trace the reverberations felt in subsequent decades in 
order to understand how latent psychic wounds may be re-opened by events at a later 
date. This thesis looks at a twenty-five year period, beginning with the newly constituted 
country under the leadership of Bolesław Bierut and ending with the dismissal of 
                                                      
28
 Norman Davies talks about ‘Poland’ as an abstract idea; “It existed in men’s minds, even if it could not 
always be observed on the ground or in the material world.” Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History 
of Poland, Volume II 1795 to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 8. 
29
 Milija Gluhovic, Performing European Memories: Trauma, Ethics, Politics (London: Palgrave 
Macmillan, 2013), 19. 
30
 Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz, The Dead Memory Machine: Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre of Death (Kraków: 
Cricoteka, 1994a), 12. 

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