Browsing by Author "Zietkiewicz, Marta"

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    Crushing Communism, Realising Democracy: Public Photographic Displays and Polish Sociocultural Politics in the 1980s and 1990s
    (2017-05-10) Pasternak, Gil; Zietkiewicz, Marta
    Our paper explored attempts made by Polish intellectuals to reorganise Poland’s sociocultural politics between the 1980s and 1990s through the installation of strategic photographic displays that explicitly challenged the very foundations of communist philosophy. In doing so, we elaborated knowledge about the participation of photography in facilitating the gradual transition of Polish society to democracy. Analysing materials preserved in private collections and Polish public archives, we discussed a range of socially oriented curatorial practices typical to the period the paper considers. Primarily, however, we payed close attention to one series of public displays put together by Aleksandra Garlicka, including for example: Photography of Polish Peasants (1985); Workers (1989); Others Among Us (1992); and Polish Intelligentsia (1995). Garlicka was an academic who came to recognise photography’s political potential when she visited the exhibition The Family of Man during its 1959-60 installation in Poland – an exhibition originally curated by the New York MoMA in 1955 to disseminate western humanistic principles and democratic values. But Garlicka was able to start putting her photographic understanding to practice only when communist politics started weakening. Featuring photographs that she gathered through open public calls and in forsaken Polish archives, each of the displays she organized demonstrated that Poland’s historical social photographies (images as well as practices) simply do not support the ideas that ‘communist elites’ wanted the Polish people to accept as their reality and collective memory. Her initiatives inspired other Polish intellectuals and ethnic minority groups to embrace photography for the same and similar purposes. The sparse literature addressing photographic practices in the former Eastern Bloc tends to pay much attention to the role photography had played in the dissemination of formal politics. Through our paper, however, we broadened considerations of the role photography has also played in challenging Eastern European communist regimes, their official legacies and social as well as cultural politics.
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    Making a Home in Poland: Photographic Education and Practices in the Landkentnish Movement
    (Brill, 2019-10-24) Pasternak, Gil; Zietkiewicz, Marta
    This article studies the photographic methods that the Poland based Landkentnish (Yiddish for “knowing the land”) movement employed in the interwar period to promote Jewish culture and Poland as a home for the Jewish people. The movement wished to increase the exposure of Polish Jews to Poland’s diverse landscapes in order to strengthen their connection to the Polish land. It also aspired to create archives of local Jewish cultural heritage to attest to the long history of Polish Jewry and to the contributions that Jews had made to Polish society. After tracing the movement’s origins, this article explores the concentrated efforts that it made to provide its members with photographic knowledge and education. Analyzing the photographic sources and resources that the movement created, the exhibitions that it put on display, and its employment of snapshots, the article demonstrates how photography assisted the movement in realizing its key aims and objectives.
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    Mieć w Polsce ojczyznę. Fotogra a w działalności żydowskiego ruchu krajoznawczego (1923-1939)
    (Society Liber pro Arte, 2017) Pasternak, Gil; Zietkiewicz, Marta
    This chapter focuses on the photographic practices that the Poland based Jewish Landkentnish (Yiddish for "Sightseeing") movement employed in the interwar period in order to promote Jewish cultural identity and Poland as a home for the Jewish people. Having emerged in 1923, the 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. While other early twentieth century Jewish organizations mostly dreamt about the establishment of a Jewish nation state elsewhere, leaders of the Landkentish movement considered Poland as a home, and the Poles as close neighbors. To achieve its goals, the movement organized a large number of photographic activities, including photography courses, exhibitions and photographic excursions to different regions in Poland. It also published various scientific and 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 advance the movement's aspirations. The Landkentish movement ceased to exist during the months that led to the beginning of the Second World War. While as a consequence it never fully accomplished its goals, it left behind some valuable, informative literature and photographic records that help to elaborate studies of Jewish history and Jewish photographic cultures alike. The chapter draws on these materials to demonstrate the role photography played in strengthening the complex historical connection of Jews to the Polish country, and to foreground innovative insights into the nature of the relationship of photography, nation building and Polish Jewry in the early twentieth century.