Browsing by Author "Ziętkiewicz, Marta"

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    Beyond the Familial Impulse: Domestic Photography and Sociocultural History in Post-communist Poland, 1989-1996
    (Taylor and Francis, 2017-05-23) Pasternak, Gil; Ziętkiewicz, Marta
    In 1994 the Jewish-Polish Shalom Foundation announced a photographic contest whose intention was to reconstruct the social and cultural histories of Polish Jews who lived in the geographical region of Poland before, during and after the Second World War. For this purpose the Foundation invited contributions from the public. Its initiative emerged shortly after the 1989 collapse of the communist regime in Poland, and alongside other similar projects that reflected the desire of Poland’s ethnic minorities to salvage their sociocultural histories – histories the communist government had virtually erased from the country’s formal historiography. In a short period of time the Foundation received more than seven thousand annotated photographs in response to its public appeal, most of which emanated from domestic photographic collections. As scholars interrogating domestic photography do not often have access to empirical data about the practices it entails, in this article we consider the Foundation photographic collection as a resource preserving invaluable information about the diverse uses and perceptions of photography in the sociocultural sphere. Yet, whereas existing scholarly literature in the field of photography studies tends to frame domestic photography with reference to affectionate familial behaviors allegedly common in democratic states, we introduce the Foundation collection as a case study that sheds light on domestic photographs created and maintained in a sociocultural environment that did not see democracy before 1989. Analyzing and discussing the various ways in which the photographs’ owners saw the photographs’ relationships with the broader politically unstable reality that has enclosed their production and preservation, our study diversifies some of the meanings and functions current literature often associates with domestic photographic collections.
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    Exhibiting Ethnic Minorities, Democratizing History: Cold War Legacies and the Jews in Poland’s Visible Sphere
    (Duke University Press, 2023) Pasternak, Gil; Ziętkiewicz, Marta
    This book chapter explores how Soviet Cold War visual doctrines and their legacies have conditioned the appearance of Jews in Poland’s visible sphere of the Polish People’s Republic and during the emergence of the post-communist Third Polish Republic. It focuses on the effects of a 1994 crowed-sourced photography contest that culminated in an exhibition, a book, and a collection of over 7000 photographic records concerning Polish-Jewish visual and living heritage. While doing so, the chapter unravels the means which the Polish state employed during the communist era to control the representational visibility of ethnic minorities and secure an impression of Poland as a socially and politically homogenized country. Analyzing the sociocultural outcomes caused by the reintroduction of images of Jews into Poland’s post-communist visible sphere, the chapter highlights the role they have played in assisting Polish society to overcome Soviet Cold War definitions of Polish culture, collective memory, history and identity.
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    Haunting Legacies: Family and Archival Photographs in Aleksandra Garlicka's Taxonomy of Polish Society (1985-95)
    (Taylor and Francis, 2019-08-07) Pasternak, Gil; Ziętkiewicz, Marta
    This article expands knowledge about photography’s participation in pro-democratic socio-political processes in the years leading to the demise of the communist Polish People’s Republic and during the creation of the post-communist Third Republic of Poland. Scholarship on photography in Poland’s late-communist period of the 1980s tends to focus on the work of politically critical art photographers. It looks especially at practitioners who denounced state museums and galleries in protest at the government’s repression of human rights and political diversity. Scholarship on photography in Poland’s post-communist era of the early 1990s usually persists in prioritizing the study of artistic photographs, exploring how the new reality in the country diversified their subject matter, style, and political orientation. In this article we shift attention towards photographic exhibitions that were installed in Poland’s formal cultural institutions in the late 1980s, and we consider uses of non-artistic photographs in the country’s public sphere of the late-communist and early post-communist periods alike. To do so, we introduce the work of historian and curator Aleksandra Garlicka, analyzing five exhibitions she organized between 1985 and 1995. In all of these, Garlicka employed archival photographs to access histories of Polish society that the communist state had striven to repress. Yet she also called on members of the public to share with her their family photographs in order to deepen the scope of her endeavor. Drawing on archival sources, interviews, and Polish literature from the period in question, we demonstrate how Garlicka deployed these photographs to promote political change in one of Poland’s most turbulent historical moments of the twentieth century. Also considering the reception and impact of her curated shows, we argue that, in Garlicka’s hands, the display of photographs in Poland’s dominant exhibition spaces challenged communist ideology and helped the Poles to come to terms with its legacies.
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    Making a Home in Poland: The Jewish Sightseeing Movement and Its Photographic Practices
    (2016) Pasternak, Gil; Ziętkiewicz, Marta
    Our paper focused on the photographic practices the Poland-based Jewish sightseeing movement employed between the two World Wars, to promote Jewish cultural identity and Poland as a home for the Jewish people. Founded in 1923, the Jewish sightseeing movement wished to expose the Jews of Poland to the country's diverse landscapes, encourage Jewish tourism in the land, and create archives of local Jewish cultural heritage with a view to investigating what Jewish culture might be in the context of European nation building. While other early twentieth-century Jewish organizations dreamt about the establishment of a Jewish nation-state elsewhere, the Jews who were involved with the Jewish sightseeing movement considered Poland as a home, and the Poles as their neighbors. To achieve their goals, members of the movement organized a large number of photographic activities, including photography courses and exhibitions, as well as photographic excursions to different regions in Poland. In addition, they published various scientific as well as more popular journals, in which movement members printed some of the photographs they captured in the country, alongside informative articles about photographic strategies that anyone with a camera could have employed to contribute to the movement's sociocultural and national aspirations. The Jewish sightseeing movement ceased to exist as soon as Poland was invaded by Germany in 1939. Its members subsequently either escaped from the country or shared the fate of the majority of Polish Jews. While, as a consequence, the Jewish sightseeing movement never fulfilled its goals, it left behind literature and photographic records that could be used to elaborate studies of Jewish history as well as expand the scope of the study of photographic history. On the one hand, the study of the movement's photographic practices can help elaborate on the complex historical relationship of Jews and the Polish country. On the other hand, it gives photographic historians an insight into early twentieth-century understandings of the relationship between photography and nation building, understandings which those European nations who felt secure in their homelands had taken for granted.
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    Subwersywna moc prywatnych kolekcji fotografii. Żydzi w polskiej pamięci zbiorowej po upadku komunizmu
    (Konteksty: Antropologia Kultury-Etnografia-Sztuka, 2017) Pasternak, Gil; Ziętkiewicz, Marta
    In 1994 the Jewish-Polish Shalom Foundation announced a photographic contest whose intention was to reconstruct the social and cultural histories of Polish Jews who lived in the geographical region of Poland before, during and after the Second World War. For this purpose the Foundation invited contributions from the public. Its initiative emerged shortly after the 1989 collapse of the communist regime in Poland, and alongside other similar projects that reflected the desire of Poland’s ethnic minorities to salvage their sociocultural histories – histories the communist government had virtually erased from the country’s formal historiography. In a short period of time the Foundation received more than seven thousand annotated photographs in response to its public appeal, most of which emanated from domestic photographic collections. As scholars interrogating domestic photography do not often have access to empirical data about the practices it entails, in this article we consider the Foundation photographic collection as a resource preserving invaluable information about the diverse uses and perceptions of photography in the sociocultural sphere. Yet, whereas existing scholarly literature in the field of photography studies tends to frame domestic photography with reference to affectionate familial behaviors allegedly common in democratic states, we introduce the Foundation collection as a case study that sheds light on domestic photographs created and maintained in a sociocultural environment that did not see democracy before 1989. Analyzing and discussing the various ways in which the photographs’ owners saw the photographs’ relationships with the broader politically unstable reality that has enclosed their production and preservation, our study diversifies some of the meanings and functions current literature often associates with domestic photographic collections. Please note: This is a Polish translation of Pasternak, Gil and Marta Ziętkiewicz. 2017. Beyond the Familial Impulse: Domestic Photography and Sociocultural History in Post-communist Poland, 1989-1996. Photography & Culture 10(2), Special Issue: Seeing Family: 121-145.