18
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.
31
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
31
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].
19
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.
32
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.’
33
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.
34
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
32
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
33
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.
34
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.