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

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complex entanglement between art and trauma in photographs produced in Poland after 
the Second World War. I do not intend to study photographs of physical wounds; my 
interest does not lie with the literal manifestation of violence inflicted on the body. 
Instead, I am interested in laying bare the traces of imperceptible wounds embedded in 
the psyche. This thesis proposes to study photographs made after 1945 in order to discern 
how imperceptible traumatic traces imprinted on the psyche of Polish artists have made 
themselves known through photographs produced in the immediate aftermath of the war, 
and in the following decades. 
Contentious debates surrounds the representation of personal and historical traumas of the 
Holocaust.
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 My intention is not to rehearse these debates, nor to address the ethics of 
representation, but rather to suggest that the events of the war were not so much difficult 
to represent, as impossible to comprehend. The events of the Second World War 
represented destruction on a scale without historical precedent, the magnitude of which 
was overwhelming and incomprehensible. In Unclaimed Experience, Caruth asks the 
question, if traumatic experience is not fully assimilated as it occurs, then “what does it 
mean to transmit and to theorise around a crisis that is marked by the ways it 
simultaneously defies and demands our witness”?
19
 Unacknowledged imprints on the 
collective and individual psyche return as repeated thoughts, behaviours, dreams and 
actions in the years that follow. What I suggest is that the photograph also provided a 
space for these traumas to re-emerge.  
Through a close analysis of a selection of photographs produced between the years 1945 
and 1970, I argue that the events of the war cast a shadow over the lives of these artists. 
What is at stake in this thesis is the proposition that a photograph can bear imperceptible 
traces of events that have wounded the psyche, which could not be articulated at the time, 
but can only be reactivated and made visible at a later date. Photographs made in the post-
                                                      
18
 Jean François Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the Jews,’ trans. A. Michel and M. Roberts (Minneapolis: 
University of Minnesota Press, 1990/1998); Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four 
Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008); 
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen 
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000); Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin Books, 1977); Jacques 
Rancière, “S’il y a de l’irreprésentable?” Genre Humain 36 (2001): 81–102, trans. Gregory Elliott as “Are 
Some Things Unrepresentable?” in Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image (London: Verso, 2007), 
109–38. For an overview of this debate see Libby Saxton, Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the 
Holocaust (London: Wallflower Press, 2008); and introduction to Concentrationary Cinema, Aesthetics as 
Political Resistance in Alan Resnais’ Night and Fog, eds. Griselda Pollock and Maxim Silverman (Oxford: 
Berghahn Books, 2012). 
19
 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 5. 

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war years provided a space to belatedly return to encrypted traumas, to relay ideas that 
could otherwise not be articulated, and to acknowledge events that had been disavowed. 
The war was not the only event that registered as traumatic to Polish citizens. In the 
following chapters I suggest that photographs bear the traces of multiple traumas that 
relate to Poland’s historical past and to events after 1945. I also look at work produced by 
artists who experienced the war directly, or “bodily” to quote Milosz, and a subsequent 
generation of artists who inherited traumas that they did not experience themselves.
20
 My 
approach has a number of key aims: to remain alert to traces of trauma embedded in the 
photographs produced in these years; to suggest how these traces manifest themselves; 
and to identify the ways in which these manifestations evolve over a twenty-five year 
period. The thesis will consider when and where these traces of trauma can be understood 
to emerge, and why. 
Trauma theory has been the subject of much scholarly attention and a large body of 
literature has developed in the last twenty years.
21
 Recent exhibitions have also taken 
trauma as their subject.
22
  Before this point, the study of trauma had been pursued in 
clinical areas, and in Holocaust studies, but it has been a more recent development to 
expand the discussion of trauma into the study of art objects. My methodological 
approach has been influenced by psychoanalytic approaches to art history that incorporate 
the writings of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, André Bazin and Roland Barthes into 
formal analyses of art to reveal the ways in which art objects can speak of subconscious  
dreads and desires. In particular, literature by Cathy Caruth, Marianne Hirsch, Margaret 
Iversen, Griselda Pollock and James Young has proved instrumental in shaping my 
approach to the topic.
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20
 Czesław Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 93. 
21
 See Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, eds. Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (London: 
Routledge, 1996). With chapters contributed by scholars from anthropology, psychiatry, and the history and 
philosophy of science, this volume helped establish the field of contemporary trauma theory. For texts on 
theoretical and clinical aspects of psychoanalysis and how they inform our contemporary understanding of 
individual and collective psychic wounds, see: Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of 
Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); Dominick 
LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (New York: Cornell University Press, 
1994); Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 
22
 See Trauma, exh. cat., (London: Hayward Gallery, 2001); Haunted: Contemporary Photography, Video, 
Performance, exh. cat., (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2010); September 11 exh. cat., (New York: P. 
S. 1 MOMA, 2012). 
23
 Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995);  
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins 
University Press, 1996); Joshua Hirsch, “Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public 
Fantasy," in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo 

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