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

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bearing witness to the impressions of traumatic traces, or sometimes generating traumatic 
imprints of their own accord. 
The thesis has three chronological chapters, which identify key artists or groups whose 
work can be understood to engage with the themes outlined above. The first chapter looks 
at attempts by photographers in the late 1940s to resuscitate the medium in the immediate 
post-war years. While Jan Bułhak, often dubbed the ‘father of polish photography’, 
continued to champion a form of Pictorialist photography, a new generation of 
photographers increasingly created work that took inspiration from abstract and surrealist 
imagery. A series of photographs produced in 1948 by Zbigniew Dłubak will be 
scrutinised; he made vague and frustrating works that impede recognition and turn away 
from a mimetic reproduction of visible realities in favour of using the camera as a tool for 
the creation of abstract imagery. In their resistance to comprehension they suggest 
something of the unassimilable kernel of trauma. Through an engagement with Cathy 
Caruth’s readings of Freud and Lacan, I suggest that the series also speaks of Dłubak’s 
survival of the war, and the ethical implications and responsibilities that this survival 
entails. Dłubak combined his abstract photographs with titles taken from a series of 
poems written by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Re-interpreting these images through the 
poetry of Neruda, I suggest that abstraction in these post-war years might not just make 
evident past traumas, but also served to comment on the events of the present, as a subtle 
critique of the newly formed socialist government. A series of landscape photographs 
begun in 1950 make this critique more evident. Dłubak’s bleak response to the Polish 
landscape serves as a foil to Bulhak’s concept of homeland photography. 
The second chapter begins by looking at a large international survey show of photography 
organised in Poznań in 1957 titled Krok w Nowoczesność [Step into Modernity]. Out of 
this exhibition I extricate a number of threads that allow us to unravel different narratives 
of trauma and different approaches to communicating their traces. The exhibition 
showcased a heterogeneous variety of ‘modern’ manifestations of photography, from 
reportage to darkroom experimentation, alongside a continued interest in abstraction. It 
also highlighted a turn to collectivity and collaboration in the post-thaw period, and a turn 
away from the centre of power in Warsaw to manifestations of art in regional provinces. 
The work produced in the 1950s demonstrates a response to the war that was not 
immediate but retrospective. Caruth quotes Michael Herr, an American war 

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correspondent writing from Vietnam, who stated, “the problem was that you didn't always 
know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in 
at all, just stayed stored there in your eyes.”
41
 Photographers in the 1950s reactivate these 
impressions after a delay of over a decade, their impact not immediate but deferred, like 
dreams that return to haunt the shell shocked soldier. In this convergence of past and 
present, the works I discuss in the second chapter can be understood to possess a double 
meaning that looks back to the past but also comments upon the present. 
Firstly, I engage with the ‘dark realism’ of Jerzy Lewczyński and Zdzisław Beksiński, 
photographs that deliberately turns away from themes of socialist success in favour of 
melancholic reflections on the Polish landscape. The photographs share a preoccupation 
with Polish literature and film from the late 1950s and a desire to expose “the black spots 
that the socialist regime could not manage to erase.”
42
 Photographs by Lewczyński prove 
especially interesting in their focus on metonymic traces that evoke the presence of absent 
bodies. The late 1950s also saw photographers returning to abstraction, increasingly 
pursuing darkroom manipulations and formal experiments, and relinquishing the 
photographic apparatus altogether to create cameraless images. The photographs of 
Marek Piasecki and Bronisław Schlabs bear the influence of Informel painting and 
associated notions of cathartic release. Abstraction returns, but manifests itself in a 
different way to Dłubak’s images: photographic framing and focus increasingly gave way 
to direct manipulations and destructive interventions on the negative. Actions by Schlabs 
and Beksiński pierce through the photographic material to lay bare the illusion of the 
image recorded in the emulsion. The second chapter ends with discussion of a 1959 
exhibition, Pokaz zamknięty [Closed Show], jointly organised by Lewczyński, Beksiński 
and Schlabs, later labelled by the critic Alfred Ligocki as Antyfotografia [Anti-
Photography].
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 The exhibition was intended to demonstrate alternative directions that 
photographers could pursue. Beksiński proposed arranging photographs into sets of 
images, and the photographers incorporated non-artistic materials into their work: found 
photographs, photocopies, newspaper clippings. While on one level, these proposals were 
attempting to breakdown notions of photographic purity, I suggest that the work exhibited 
                                                      
41
 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 10. 
42
 Jerzy Toeplitz, “New Trends in Cultural and Sociological films in Poland,” (report prepared for 1964 
Mannheim International Film Festival Round Table sponsored by UNESCO, Paris: UNESCO 30 December 
1964) in Bjørn Sørenssen, “The Polish Black Series Documentary and the British Free Cinema Movement” 
in A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas, ed., Anikó Imre (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 11. 
43
 Alfred Ligocki, “Antyfotografia” [Anti-Photography], Fotografia, 9 no. 76 (September 1959): 442-445. 

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