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

42 
 
and controlling the photographic emulsion. The image insistently points to the role of the 
photographer in transforming the photographic material. Interestingly, her fingertips 
appear to meet the fingertips of the ghostly apparition, making visible a moment of 
connection between these two selves. The image appears to make visible the notion that 
Roland Barthes would later articulate in Camera Lucida, namely that a connection 
through light is established between the viewer of a photograph and its subject via the 
osmotic surface of the photographic paper:  
From a real body which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, 
who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of 
the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A 
sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, 
though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has 
been photographed.
31
  
Somewhat surprisingly, Dłubak also chose to include the pre-war photographers Bułhak 
and Sempoliński in his show. Yet even here, we see a reality under transformation. 
Sempoliński’s Koniec zabawy [End of Games] appears to be a simple documentary image 
of reflections on water carefully framed to eliminate the horizon line and remove all sense 
of perspective [I.10]. In the context of this exhibition, Dłubak invites viewers to read the 
image as an exercise in formal patterning and texture. Understood in this way, the image 
becomes increasingly disorientating; it proves difficult to differentiate the three planes – 
the pond scum on the surface of water, the sky above and the reflection of its clouds in 
the water – all of which are collapsed into one flat field.
 32
 Perhaps most unexpectedly, 
Bułhak himself was also included.
33
 Bułhak’s silver gelatin print Kościół P. Marii – 
Gdańsk [Church of the Virgin Mary] [I.11] was taken in the northern town of Gdańsk, 
and it retains the hazy composition of his earlier bromoil prints, but reveals an element of 
abstraction in his work. The photograph documents the interior of a church, with pillars 
dappled in sunlight and shadow, but details are obscured by the heavy patterning created 
                                                      
31
 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & 
Wand, 1981), 80-81. 
32
 In the late 1960s Sempoliński breaks with the documentary mode altogether, producing a series of 
“agrographics” [agrografie] that had little to do with reality: abstract compositions created by applying 
chemicals directly to photographic paper, referencing informel painting. This direction of photoraphy will 
be addressed in the section on abstraction in the following chapter.  
33
 Dłubak possessed a certain amount of respect for Bułhak, acknowledging the merits of his practice even 
though it diverged from his own interests. Furthermore this respect was reciprocated; Bułhak was one of the 
main advocates for Dłubak’s election to ZPAF. 

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43 
 
by light streaming into the church through the leaded windows.
  
The participation of this 
leading Pictorialist in an exhibition of modern photography was significant, especially at 
this moment of transition between the two styles. His inclusion suggested that the formula 
of photographic modernity being propagated by Dłubak was beginning to usurp the 
position previously held by Bułhak’s formulation of photography. Dłubak later suggested, 
“we considered the sending of a photograph by Jan Bułhak to the exhibition as a sign of 
alliance with the young, a certain kind of tolerance on the part of the master who 
understands the mechanisms of the movement of history.”
34 
Dłubak’s 1948 exhibition marked a significant shift for the medium of photography, 
harnessing the camera as a tool for the creation of original imagery rather than the slavish 
reproduction of a visible reality or the imitation of painting. This new direction met with 
criticism. The art critic Wiesław Hudon later recalled how the exhibition was inscribed 
into the history of Polish photography as “an exhibition of lunatics.”
35
 The work exhibited 
by Dłubak certainly broke with the prevailing current of artistic photography; the 
photographer Jerzy Lewczyński later acknowledged that Dłubak’s efforts had “opened a 
new period of attempts to liberate photography from the existing canons of art.”
36
  
 
ABSTRACTION 
This new direction was best exemplified by the photographs that Dłubak himself 
contributed to the Nowoczesna Fotografika Polska show. He included a selection of 
curious photographs, which had been the subject of his first solo photography exhibition 
earlier that year at Klub Młodych Artystów i Naukowców [Club of Young Artists and 
Scientists] (KMAiN) in Warsaw in June 1948. These strange and disorientating images 
seem intent on frustrating the evidential quality of the photograph in favour of something 
more allusive and enigmatic; their mysterious quality compounded by evocative titles. 
Nocami straszy męka głodu [The Agony of Hunger Haunts at Night] features an 
ambiguous structure that resembles coral, but could equally be a magnified particle of 
dust, a scientific molecule, or an amorphous apparition from a nightmare [I.12]; Dzieci 
                                                      
34
 Dłubak, “Introduction,” in Edward Hartwig: Fotografika, n.p. 
35
 Wiesław Hudon,‘“Wariaci’ i egzaltowani’ [‘Lunactics’ and exalted], Fotografia 12 no. 186 (December 
1968): 266-276. 
36
 Jerzy Lewczyński, Antologia fotografii polskiej: 1839-1989 (Bielsko-Biała: Wydawnictwo LUCRUM, 
cop. 1999), 93. 

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