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

40 
 
embellishment upon the work of a craftsman,” resulting in a “cliché-ridden range of 
‘romantic moods’.”
26
 In the text, Dłubak called for a change of attitude in the handling of 
imagery among modern photographers: 
The naturalistic convention has such a strong hold on our artistic consciousness, 
that we do not have enough courage to drop the unnecessary ballast and we do not 
use the rich yet unexploited resources – the suggestiveness of the forms of objects 
and their associative values. Rather than treating these factors as marginal, we 
must turn to them in our search for a possible new approach to photography – 
making it a form of high artistic quality. Such an approach to the problem will 
contribute to the abolition of the present slavish dependency of photography upon 
nature. Reality may then become the material for art in the full sense of the world, 
not only letting us go beyond the range of directly presented images of nature, but 
also opening perspectives for new means of visual expression, not available in 
other domains of art.
27
 
In illustration of these points, Dłubak selected ten photographers for the show, each of 
whom could be understood to be breaking with these “naturalistic conventions” by 
abstracting or transforming reality in various ways.
28
 All the works selected by Dłubak 
for the exhibition showed artists beginning to explore more experimental modes of image 
making that complicated photography’s connection to naturalistic depiction.  
Fortunata Obrąpalska was one such artist. Her early pre-war work had been greatly 
influenced by Bułhak’s pictorialist style, but after the war Obrąpalska, together with her 
husband Zygmunt, moved to Poznań, where she became associated with the artistic 
collective 4F+R, and from 1947 begun pursuing a more experimental style of imagery.
29
 
In the Nowoczesna Fotografika Polska exhibition she exhibited works from her series 
Dyfuzja w cieczy [Diffusion of Liquids], which appeared to be indebted to her earlier 
study of chemistry. Beginning with a glass jar of water, Obrąpalska added drops of ink 
                                                      
26
 Ibid. 
27
 Ibid. 
28
 Full list of artists exhibited: Jan Bułhak, Roman Burzyński, Zbigniew Czajkowski, duo of Marian and 
Witold Dederko, Zbigniew Dłubak, Edward Hartwig, Fortunata Obrąpalska, Zbigniew P kosławski, 
Leonard Sempoliński, Irena Strzemieczna. 
29
 4F+R stands for: form, paint, material, fantasy + realism [forma, farba, faktura, fantastyka + realism]. 
Founded in 1947 by the artists Ildephonsus Houwalt, Alfred Lenica and Felix M. Nowowiejski with the aim 
of propelling art in Poznań towards the more modern tendencies being pursued by Kantor in Kraków. The 
group staged two exhibitions of Obrąpalska’s work in 1947 and 1949. 

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41 
 
and photographed the subsequent dispersal of the ink within the water.
30
 While the series 
as a whole is given a scientific title, the images themselves possess more evocative and 
metaphorical names – Ciszę [Silence], Przekleństwo [Curse], Tancerka [Dancer] – which 
affect our reading of the images, activating our subconscious associative mechanisms to 
render the traces of ink almost figurative. In Przekleństwo [Curse] (1947) [1.6], the image 
has been rotated 180 degrees, so that the ink unexpectedly flows upwards instead of 
down, resembling ephemeral curls of smoke. At the centre of the image, we are tempted 
to read a talismanic figure, stirring up a storm of dark forces. Tancerka [Dancer] (1948) 
[1.7] is suggestive of the graceful movement evoked by the floating dye, the large globule 
of ink resembling a head upon the neck of an undulating body. This associative quality 
led Polish critics to liken Obrąpalska’s works to Surrealism, a link supported by an essay 
that Obrąpalska published in Świat Fotografii in September 1948, titled ‘Efekty 
surrealistyczne w fotografice’ [Surrealistic effects in photography]. Although Obrąpalska 
did not identify with the ideological basis of surrealism, she borrowed from its manner of 
expression.  
Obrąpalska also experimented with darkroom techniques to create unusual visual effects. 
With its silvery, almost metallic tones, Tancerka is a solarised photograph; the 
accompanying image, Tancerka II [Dancer II] [1.8] flips this original image along a 
vertical axis to produce a mirror image, and has been inversely printed, inverting the 
expected tonal relationships. In doing so Obrąpalska confuses the relationship of dark and 
light tones, causing light areas in the original to take on a deep black hue, while the 
original areas of darkness are transformed into bright almost luminescent white. In each 
of the works exhibited by Dłubak in his 1948 exhibition, the role of the photographer 
becomes increasingly crucial in transforming an otherwise descriptive documentary 
photograph into an articulation of his or her own subjective vision. This is made explicit 
in Obrąpalska’s image Studium II [Study II], illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, in 
which we see a black shadowy figure looming over the image, perhaps the author herself 
[I.9]. Alongside her shadow, we also see a face and body reflected back at us. 
Obrąpalska’s presence in the work is insistently felt, her hands raised and poised akin to a 
puppeteer, as if ready to conduct proceedings, or like a sorceress over a cauldron stirring 
                                                      
30
 The series was reproduced in the May 1948 issue of Świat Fotografii, and was awarded First Prize in a 
competition sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and Arts. Obrąpalska had to abandon her photographic 
work in the darkroom at the end of the 1950s after developing an allergy to the chemicals she had been 
using.  

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