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

34 
 
propaganda device,” walking “a fine line in calibrating the allowable portrayal of 
ruination” in the media and in exhibitions.
9
 At a time of political uncertainty, images 
appeared in exhibitions and in Polish magazines; the journal Stolica [Capital City] 
contrasted views of Warsaw in ruins with new facades under construction, to demonstrate 
the achievements of Poland’s reconstruction. David Snyder has discussed these sets of 
photographic pairings, and described them as a “rigorous publicity campaign using 
photographic images and ideological pronouncement cloaked in nationalist rhetoric, [that] 
aimed to remould collective consciousness.”
10
 Certainly the photographs were infused 
with ideological meanings. David Crowley has suggested that the ruined city of Warsaw 
became a symbol of national revival; the task of remaking Warsaw was turned into an 
“opportunity for a muscular display of the might of a command economy and state 
socialism.”
11
 This demonstration was carried out primarily through photographic 
imagery. Magdalena Wróblewska’s study of Sempoliński’s photographs goes one step 
further and suggests that a focus on the reconstruction of the city was in fact tantamount 
to a form of denial. Images of reconstruction served to disavow the original destruction 
and erase it from national consciousness.
12
 
The process of reconstruction was likened in the Polish press to a resurrection, and the 
words used to describe the reconstruction in the Polish press frequently utilised biblical 
metaphors. The Biuro Odbudowy Stolicy [Bureau for the Reconstruction of the Capital] 
(BOS) was the government agency tasked with rebuilding Warsaw. Their official 
publication Stolica chronicled the ‘New Socialist Warsaw’ rising from the ashes. A 
November 3, 1946 issue of Stolica featured a photo-essay which once again paired before 
and after images of the city of Warsaw. The title of the article would have possessed 
particular resonance with a readership, which for the first time in the nation’s history, was 
predominantly Roman Catholic. Titled “Beautiful Warsaw that is, Alas, No More, and 
which We Will Resurrect,” the Polish verb wskrzesić [resurrection] is used rather than 
rebuilding or reconstructing, which Snyder suggests served two functions; it articulated 
                                                      
9
 Andreas Schönle, Architecture of Oblivion: Ruins and Historical Consciousness in Modern Russia 
(DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011), 155; 161.  
10
 David Snyder, “Rhetorics and Politics. Polish architectural modernism in the early post-war years,” in 
Alternative Visions of Post-War Reconstruction: Creating the Modern Townscape, eds. John Pendlebury, 
Erdem Erten, Peter J Larkham (London: Routledge, 2015), 176. 
11
 Crowley, Warsaw, 36. 
12
 Magdalena Wróblewska, “Warsaw photographed: time, place and memory,” 
Image [&] Narrative
 [e-
journal], 23 (2008). Accessed March 24, 2017. 
 
http://www.imageandnarrative.be/timeandphotography/wroblewska.htm.
  

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35 
 
“the martyr status of Warsaw and reinforced the well-established Polish self-image as ‘the 
Christ of the Nations’ (Polska Chrystusem narodów).”
13
 Interestingly this trope of Polish 
identity had its roots in Adam Mickiewicz’s epic poem Pan Tadeusz (1834), written in 
the wake of 1830 Uprising following the eighteenth century period of partitioning the 
1815 Congress of Vienna, which rendered South-Eastern Polish lands a puppet state of 
the Russian empire.  
 
I OGÓLNOPOLSKA WYSTAWA FOTOGRAFIKI [First National Exhibition of Art 
Photography] (1947) 
The language of ‘resurrection’ also found its way into the art world. The I Ogólnopolska 
Wystawa Fotografiki [First National Exhibition of Art Photography] was a group 
exhibition dedicated to art photography that opened in April 1947 at the Muzeum 
Wielkopolskie [Museum of Greater Poland] in Poznań, organised by the Stowarzyszenie 
Miłośników Fotografii [Association of Photographic Enthusiasts] [I.3]. The introductory 
text written for the exhibition catalogue is revealing on a number of levels. The text was 
written by Marian Schulz, a reporter on photography at the Ministry of Culture and Art, 
whose choice of language deserves close scrutiny. Instead of referring to photographic 
technique or subject matter, as one might expect for an exhibition of photography, Schulz 
cites biblical references. The start of one paragraph emphatically declares, “In the 
beginning was the word,” compounded by phrases which refer to elements of the Catholic 
Mass, such as “smoke on the altar of beauty” and “the eating of the bread.”
14
 Schulz also 
quoted the first verse in the Gospel of St. John, a gospel which recounts Jesus’s acts of 
spiritual salvation, physical healing and his deliverance of his followers from the 
influence of evil – acts which take on a particularly charged meaning when transposed to 
the post-war context. The message of resurrection that BOC perpetuated in the articles of 
Stolica were reinforced in the context of the art world.  
Rather than dwelling on the past, Schulz advises Polish artists to start afresh, his words 
pointing to new beginnings. This is compounded by references to a redemptive light: 
                                                      
13
 David I. Snyder, “Rhetorics and Politics. Polish architectural modernism in the early post-war years,” in 
Alternative Visions of Post-War Reconstruction eds. Pendlebury, Erten and Larkham, 166. 
14
 Marian Schulz, introduction to I Ogólnopolska Wystawa Fotografiki [First National Exhibition of Art 
Photography], exhibtition catalogue, Muzeum Wielkopolskie, Poznań (April-May, 1947), n.p. 

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