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

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Władysław Gomułka as First President of the Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza 
[Polish United Workers’ Party] (PZPR) in 1970. Within these twenty-five years, Poland 
undergoes a series of transitions and changes in leadership, government politics and 
population. Periods of optimism and leniency oscillated with phases of repression, rigid 
control and social unrest. The three chapters that make up this thesis correspond to three 
stages in the socialist rule of post-war Poland. The first chapter considers the years 
immediately following the Yalta conference in February 1945, in which Poland faced the 
immense task of reconstructing Poland in terms of its borders, its cities and its people. 
Different factions struggled to acquire a firm power base and to establish control of the 
newly reorganised country, creating a situation akin to a civil war.
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 The late 1940s saw a 
period of Stalinisation in Poland under the newly formed Communist PZPR, the hard-line 
leadership of President Bierut and the imposition of Socialist Realism in 1949. The 
second chapter corresponds to the period of thaw that followed Stalin’s death in 1953. 
Social unrest continued, most notably rearing its head in the strikes and riots of Poznań 
1956, but the inauguration of Gomułka as First President ushered in a period of moderate 
leadership and leniency, particularly in matters of culture. The third chapter looks at the 
late 1960s, by which time Gomułka’s reforms and overspending had led to economic 
losses and political difficulties for the Party. As Gomulka’s popularity declined and his 
reforms lost impetus, the Party’s exercise of power became increasingly repressive. The 
late 1960s saw a resurgence of anti-Jewish sentiments, which manifested themselves in 
purges and harassment under Mieczysław Moczar’s anti-Semitic campaign. The Warsaw 
Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 led to student strikes and riots, which 
were violently suppressed by security forces. Within these twenty-five years, cycles of 
events can be witnessed, moments when the Party returned to totalitarian rule in the face 
of popular resistance. The end of this thesis coincides with the end of Gomułka’s tenure. 
Rather than looking at reportage photography, in which the above events are more 
directly visualised, this thesis takes a quite specific genre of photography as its subject in 
order to look at the way events manifest themselves indirectly or obliquely in the art of 
the period. I propose to investigate art photography, defined here as photographs 
produced to be exhibited in art exhibitions or published in art journals. This remit 
                                                      
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 The provision government established at Yalta - Tymczasowy Rząd Jedności Narodowej [Provisional 
Government of National Unity] - comprised members from a number of different Parties: Polska Partia 
Robotnicza [Polish Workers' Party], Polska Partia Socjalistyczna [Polish Socialist Party], Polskie 
Stronnictwo Ludowe [Polish Peasant Party] and Stronnictwo Ludowe [People's Party] and Stronnictwo 
Demokratyczne [Alliance of Democrats].  

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excludes works produced on commission for government agencies. All the photographers 
discussed in the following pages were employed in official capacities in some way: 
Zdzisław Beksiński used his knowledge of engineering to help construct factories, 
Andrzej Różycki was employed a photojournalist for the Toruń News Journal, and Jerzy 
Lewczyński designed occupational safety and hygiene posters. Often this photographic 
work is exceptionally interesting, and deserves to be the subject of a separate study.
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Primary sources scrutinised include exhibitions catalogues and magazines and journals 
published in Poland. To supplement this close visual analysis, I also make use of written 
articles published in magazines, speeches given at official occasions, correspondence 
between artists, and interviews.  
Polish photography has been the topic of numerous surveys. In the 1960s, art critic 
Urszula Czartoryska published Przygody Plastyczne Fotografii [Artistic Adventures of 
Photography] (1965), a key text in Polish photographic criticism. Retrospective 
exhibitions of Polish photography have been staged internationally from the end of the 
1970s, and tend to have been organised as a history delineated through successive Polish 
photography ‘greats’ or ‘masters.’
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 More recent publications include the Polish 
photographer Jerzy Lewczyński’s Antologia fotografii polskiej: 1839-1989 [Anthology of 
Polish photography] (1999), which surveyed developments over 150 years of the 
medium’s history in Poland.
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 Photography curator Adam Mazur has more recently 
attempted to bring this research up to date, extending his survey into the twenty-first 
century: Historie fotografii w Polsce, 1839-2009 [Histories of Photography in Poland 
1839-2009] (2009). Interesting, to my mind, is that these exhibitions and surveys tend to 
pay scant attention to the years immediately following the Second World War. For 
example, a 1981 Pompidou show featured almost two hundred works from the years 1900 
to 1981, yet the years 1945 to 1970 featured only twenty images. Nineteenth and early 
                                                      
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 An exhibition of Lewczynski’s posters was staged at Asymetria Gallery, Warsaw (March–May 2013) 
titled BHP, historia pewnej wyobraźni [Occupational Safety and Health. The History of an Imagination]. 
Accessed April 7, 2017, http://www.asymetria.eu/en/html/?str=podstrona_wystawy&id=435b02e_dda&t=3  
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 The exhibition Fotografia Polska: original masterworks from public and private collections in Poland, 
1839-1945, and a selection of avant-garde photography, film, and video from 1945 to the present, was 
staged at the International Centre of Photography (ICP) in New York between July and September 1979, 
curated by William A. Ewing, with advice from the Polish art historians Adam Sobota, Julius Garztecki and 
Urszula Czartoryska. This was followed two years later by a reformulated version of the ICP show that 
travelled to the Centre Georges Pompidou, entitled, La Photographie Polonaise 1900–1981.  
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 Lewczyński serves as an important figure not just as an artist photographer, but also in promoting the 
history of Polish photography. In 1999 he published his anthology, a survey of photography in Poland 
featuring essays by Adam Sobota and Urszula Czartoryska that outline historical and critical appraisals of 
Polish photography. The book also includes a useful summary of the holdings of key photographic 
collections in Poland.  

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