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

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Union, were repressed or written out of the official discourse of national remembrance. 
The disavowal of the perceived treachery of the Red Army in 1944 is one example that 
Crowley gives of the way in which “the past was blurred, deformed or ignored when it 
could not be squared with official ideology.”
13
 Such manipulations and censorship 
influenced the ways in which the Holocaust and the events of the war were remembered – 
or not – in official narratives.
14
 These gaps in the nation’s history can in themselves be 
understood as inherently traumatic, breaches that render the past unknowable and 
unavailable to consciousness. These distortions did not just possess implications for 
collective remembrance, but also had ramifications for individual psychology too. Other 
outlets had to be found to communicate traumatic events in the nation’s history.  
The choice of verb used by Wajda is also significant: ‘we had to expose our wounds’. 
Exposure implies uncovering, making visible, and in the context of the Warsaw Uprising 
can be understood as a declared intention to reveal the inaccuracies of recent historical 
remembrance. Exposure also calls to mind the photographic process – the idea of light 
streaming through an open aperture and imprinting itself on the negative material. 
Wajda’s choice of words intertwines the traumatic and the photographic. In both, an 
impression is made on a vulnerable and receptive substance, which lies latent until later 
reactivated, or developed, at a distance from the original moment of recording. Margaret 
Iversen’s Photography, Trauma and Trace (2017) is the most recently published book to 
make analogies between the structure of trauma in the psyche and the physical structure 
of the photograph, both of them premised on an indexical mode of imprinting and 
exposure that bypasses intention and consciousness. She opens her book by stating,  
                                                      
13
 Ibid. After the war the liberation of the city was claimed in official press as an unequivocal Soviet 
triumph. In the 1950s, Party ideologues claimed the resistance fighters were as much to blame for the 
destruction of the city as the Germans.  Katyn serves as another salient example: under Soviet orders, 
22,000 Polish officers were executed in 1940. Soviets blamed Germany for the massacre, and under Soviet 
rule in Poland the issues were suppressed in the official discourse of national remembrance. Gluhovic, for 
example, points to the ways in which Soviet involvement in the war – namely the torture, murder and 
deportation of millions of victims to Gulags at the hands of the Soviet regime – did not find its way into 
official memory. The subject of Katyn remained a taboo subject for decades, into the 1980s. (Milija 
Gluhowic, Performing European Memories: Trauma, Ethics, Politics, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 
2013), 6-7.)  
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 A scene from Andrzej Wajda’s film Man of Marble (2008) makes visible these gaps in remembrance. 
Agnieska, a young film student, enters an art museum in search of a marble statue. A long tracking shot 
pans through the paintings on display, “a journey through the ‘official’ visual remembrance of the Polish 
nation.” However, upstairs in the attic, we are shown the artworks of Stalinist socialist realism, locked away 
in cages. Sørenssen has described this as “a visual reminder of the repressed past in the modernised 
'people's democracy' of the 1970s,” the decade in which the film is set. (Bjørn Sørenssen, “‘Visual 
Eloquence' and Documentary Form: Meeting Man of Marble in Nowa Huta,” in Orr and Ostrowska, The 
cinema of Andrzej Wajda, 105.) 

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Photography as a medium is often associated with the psychic effects of trauma. 
The automaticity of the process, the wide-open camera lens, and the light 
sensitivity of film all lend themselves to this association. Just as photography, to 
some extent, bypasses artistic intention and convention, so also the traumatic 
event bypasses consciousness. Both involve an indelible impression of something 
generated outside.
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The shadowy revenants of photography and trauma were earlier discussed by Freud in his 
1939 essay ‘Moses and Monotheism’. In this text he suggested that the process of 
photography bears structural similarities to trauma, observing that his notion of ‘deferred 
action’ could be likened to “a photographic exposure which can be developed after an 
interval of time and transformed into a picture.”
16
 After Freud, numerous scholars have 
drawn analogies between trauma and photography. Notably Roland Barthes in Camera 
Lucida (1980) offered a traumatic understanding of the photographic medium, indebted to 
the seminars of Jacques Lacan. Ulrich Baer’s Spectral Evidence: The Photography of 
Trauma (2002) also sees similarities between the two on the basis of delayed processing 
and unconscious registration: he writes of  
a postponement or delay by which an event that occurs but is not consciously 
registered is only brought into experience at a later date, just as a film exposed in 
a flash undergoes a prolonged process of development and fixing. Traumatic 
events [...] exert their troubling grip on memory and on the imagination because 
they were not consciously experienced at the time of their occurrence. [...] Trauma 
results from experiences that are registered as ‘reality imprints’ or, as psychiatrists 
have phrased it, recorded ‘photographically, without integration into semantic 
memory.’
17
 
The relationship between photography and trauma represents an active field of academic 
study, suggesting that my own thesis is timely in its investigation. Like Baer and Iversen, 
I do not propose to look at photographs of traumatic scenes, but instead to explore the 
                                                      
15
 Margaret Iversen, Photography, Trace, and Trauma, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017), 1. 
16
 Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays (1939), The Standard Edition, vol. 23, 3-132. 
17
 Ulrich Baer. Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 8. 
See also, Walter Benjamin, ‘A Little History of Photography,’ Selected Writings, vol. 2, ed. Michael W. 
Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); Margaret Iversen, “What is a Photograph?” 
Art History 17 no. 3 (September 1994), 450-464; Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: 
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux York, 2003). 

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