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

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in this show was also fundamentally tied to history, to a recovery of traces of the past, and 
a reinvigoration of issues around remembrance.  
The third and final chapter looks at a new wave of young Polish photographers working 
in the 1960s, especially artists associated with the student group Zero 61. Artists 
discussed in previous chapters had experienced the war directly as primary witnesses or 
survivors. This chapter introduces a younger generation who were born in the aftermath, 
who did not experience the war in the same way, but who bear the traumas of previous 
generations. The chapter begins with the 1968 exhibition Fotografia Subiektywna 
[Subjective Photography], organised in Kraków by Zbigniew Dłubak, which took its 
name from Otto Steinert’s concept of Subjektive Fotografie [Subjective Photography]. 
The works produced under this banner blurred the boundaries between artistic mediums 
and prioritised the centrality of the artist-photographer in the creative process. The 
montages of Andrzej Różycki are particularly interesting for the way that the past of the 
Polish nation appears to haunt its present landscape. The montages bring together 
collective memory and family snapshots, intertwining Różycki’s personal histories with 
those of the nation. Marianne Hirsch’s theory of postmemory guides my analysis here. 
Hirsch suggests that the past of one generation inhabits the psychological present of the 
children that follow, who are haunted by the presence of a past that they do not know. 
Hirsch suggests that this directs the young towards fantasy and imagination, an 
assessment supported by the work of the Zero 61 photographers.  
In 1969 a small exhibition was staged by the Zero 61 group in an abandoned blacksmith’s 
forge in Torun. This remarkable show is the focus of the second section of the third 
chapter and traces the change from highly stylised exhibitions of art photography to an 
exhibition where photography was not just degraded but humiliated. Images were taken 
off the walls and scattered on the floor, pinned to the ceiling, glued to doors, or thrown on 
top of piles of rubble. Objects found on site were exhibited as ready-mades, or assembled 
into strange configurations. Works by Józef Robakowski and Wojciech Bruszewski 
foregrounded an indexical approach to artmaking. The Kuźnia [Forge] exhibition 
demonstrated a shift from taking photographs of traces (as pursued by Lewczyński in the 
1950s) to using casts, imprints and moulds to create their own traces. Iversen has 
suggested that forms of art making that involve a physical imprint emphasise the initial 

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wounding moment of trauma, the imprinting of an indelible trace on the psyche.
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 This 
chapter explores how traces of trauma do not just present themselves on the surface of a 
photograph, but are communicated through photographic or other indexical processes of 
making.  
Reflecting on these three decades makes evident how certain historical events recur, 
notably repeated episodes of anti-Semitism and persecution of Jewish citizens, in the late 
1950s and again in the late 1960s. This repetition suggests that the magnitude of the 
horror embodied by the Second World War remained unprocessed in the collective 
psyche and made numerous unwanted and compulsive traumatic returns in the following 
years. In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Caruth suggested that the traumatised “carry 
an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history 
that they cannot entirely possess.”
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 Caruth suggests that what is being repeated is not the 
trauma, but the lack of preparedness:  “The shock of the mind’s relation to the threat of 
death is thus not the experience of the threat, but precisely the missing of this experience, 
the fact that, not being experienced in time, it has not yet been fully known.”
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 Repetition 
compulsion, according to Freud, rehearses the traumatic event in order to develop anxiety 
retrospectively.
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 The repetitious nature of Polish history in these years also suggests that 
the denial of events in official narratives of history locked the nation into a cycle of 
repeated return of unprocessed memories.  
The art made in these decades also serves to reinforce this sense of repetition. In the 
following chapters, artists can be seen to gravitate towards certain themes and subject 
matter: abstraction; traces and mnemonic objects; entropy and destruction. The tendency 
towards abstraction, for example, emerges after the war, only to be suppressed in the 
years of Socialist Realism, and make repeated returns in the 1950s and 1960s. Why does 
abstraction re-emerge at these particular times? What function does abstraction serve at 
different historical moments? Repetition allows me to trace the evolution of these forms 
over time, from photographic abstractions, produced using only the properties inherent to 
the medium – framing, focus, depth of field – which evolve into abstractions made by 
working directly on the photosensitive material – spraying, dripping, tearing, burning. 
The interest in traces and mnemonic objects also evolves, and demonstrates a shift in the 
                                                      
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 See Margaret Iversen, Photography, Trace, and Trauma, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017). 
45
 Caruth, Trauma, 5.  
46
 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 62. 
47
 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), 60.    

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