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

52 
 
that he has once again seen too late to prevent the burning.” She continues, “to awaken is 
thus precisely to awaken only to one’s repetition of a previous failure to see in time.”
69
 
Lacan suggests that the dream is not about a father sleeping in the face of external death, 
but rather it is about the very identity of the father as bound up with the death that he 
survives. For Caruth, this constitutes Lacan’s profound insight: “If Freud reads in the 
dream of the burning child the story of a sleeping consciousness figured by a father 
unable to face the accidental death of his child, Lacan, for his part, reads in the awakening 
the story of the way father and child are inextricably bound together through the story of 
a trauma.”
70
 For Lacan this constitutes an ethical relation to the real; awakening from the 
dream engages a larger question of responsibility. Caruth summarises, “to awaken is thus 
to bear the imperative to survive: to survive no longer simply as the father of a child, but 
as the one who must tell what it means not to see.”
71
 What does this mean for Dłubak, 
himself a survivor of the camps? To awaken from the dream world that he has created in 
his images would be to awaken to his survival, to his status as witness, and to 
acknowledge his inability to have seen those events in time, his lack of preparedness for 
the events of the war. Caruth suggests that through the act of survival, the repeated failure 
to have seen in time becomes “the imperative of a speaking that awakens others,” an 
imperative to transmit this failure to have seen in time to others. Interestingly the message 
Dłubak chooses to transmit in the post-war years is characterised by incomprehensibility, 
his photographs speak of the frustration of vision and the impossibility of seeing.
72
  
Dłubak created this series within a particular political climate in late 1940s Poland. In 
September 1948 Bolesław Bierut was appointed Secretary General of the Central 
Committee of the Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza [Polish United Workers’ Party] 
(PZPR), an appointment which cemented Soviet influence in Polish politics. Poland was 
subjected to increasingly restrictive rule under the influence of Stalin, especially in 
matters of culture. Art increasingly came to be seen as a way of measuring “the sincerity 
of the artist’s relationship with socialism.”
73
 The year prior to his appointment, Bierut had 
made a speech to mark the opening of a radio station in Wrócław. This speech in 
November 1947 set out the role the Party expected art to play in society: “Of the various 
                                                      
69
 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 100. 
70
 Ibid., 102.  
71
 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 103. 
72
 Ibid.,107. 
73
 Vit Havránek, “The Post-Bipolar Order and the Status of Public and Private under Communism,” in 
Promises of the Past, eds. Christine Macel and Nata a Petres in (Zurich: Jrp Ringier, 2010), 27. 

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53 
 
means of affecting people, it is art that probably has the most profound and universal 
impact on society, improving it, enlightening and nurturing it. A work of art can 
profoundly affect the mind as well as the feelings and the imagination, can electrify 
people, persuade and captivate them.”
74
 Bierut’s words make clear that art had a function, 
a specific job to do, and the form that this art was to take became increasingly debated. 
The Polish art critic Urszula Czartoryska retrospectively noted that “the evolution of 
experimental photography reached its apogee in 1948,” a trajectory that was abruptly 
curtailed the following year with the imposition of Socialist Realism.
75
   
At this charged moment, in both culture and politics, Dłubak chose to title his abstract 
photographs with excerpts from a poem by the Chilean writer Pablo Neruda, El corazón 
magallánico (1519) [The Magellan Heart] (1942), an epic poem that was translated into 
Polish by Czesław Miłosz.
76
 Dłubak appropriated his titles from the headings to different 
sections of the poem: Budzę się nagle w nocy myśląc o dalekim Południu [I wake up 
suddenly at night thinking of the distant south] [I.18]; I remember the loneliness of the 
straights [Przypominam samotność cieśniny] [I.15]; Odkrywcy zjawiają się I nic z nich 
nie zostaje [Discoveries appear and disappear without trace] [I.16]; Dosięga Pacyfiku [It 
Reaches the Pacific]. Lech Lechowicz suggests this was one of the first attempts in 
Poland to connect photography with poetry. The photographs served as a visual 
complement to the poem, suggesting associative meanings that could be produced from 
the combination of image and text. El Corazon Magallanico begins with a sailor who is 
lost and disorientated; the first nine lines recount how he is unable to remember who he 
is, what day it is, where he is from. This disorientation invoked at the start of the poem is 
reinforced in Dłubak’s accompanying picture, Budzę się nagle w nocy myśląc o dalekim 
Południu [I.18] which is almost impossible to decipher; we see a surface that resembles 
glass or frozen water upon which appear globules of water and painterly brush marks. A 
nebulous cloud of faint droplets resembles stars in the distant cosmos; the large bright 
circle that looms behind could be the disk of a setting sun or a rising moon. There is very 
little we can say for certain about the image. Just like the sailor, the viewer is at sea.  
                                                      
74
 Quoted in Adam Czerniawski, “Engineering the People's Dreams,” in The Mature Laurel. Essays on 
Modem Polish Poetry (Bridgend: Seren Books, 1991), 136. 
75
 Urszula Czartoryska, “Avant-garde photography in Poland,” in Pr sences polonaises: l'art vivant autour 
du Mus e de  ódź, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1983), 25. 
76
 Published in the magazine Cuadernos Americanos [American Notebooks] in 1942. 

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