Traces of Trauma in Post-War Polish Photography
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Exposing Wounds: Traces of Trauma in Post-War Polish Photography Sabina Gill A thesis submitted for the degree of PhD Department of Philosophy & Art History University of Essex May 2017 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My gratitude must firstly be extended to my supervisor Maggie Iversen, who I increasingly believe must have the patience of a saint. The support from Tate needs acknowledgement, firstly from my supervisor Simon Baker, but also Kasia Redzisz in the Curatorial department, and Nigel Llewellyn and Helen Griffiths in the Research Department, who greatly assisted me in organising a research seminar on Polish photography at Tate Modern in June 2013. My gratitude also extends to all those who participated in the seminar, especially to those who presented papers: Karolina Lewandowska, who co-organised the event, Sylwia Serafinowicz, Marika Kuźmicz, Sarah James, Krzysztof Pijarski, and Chantal Pontbriand. The encouragement and enthusiasm of fellow Collaborative Doctoral Award Students at Tate has also been stimulating. Thank you to Karolina Lewandowska and Rafał Lewandowski, both for the extraordinary access they offered to the archives of the Archaeology of Photography Foundation and Galeria Asymetria in Warsaw for the purposes of my research, but also for their hospitality in welcoming me into their home and sharing their extensive archive of photography magazines. I would like to thank the many Polish artists and curators who have taken the time to discuss the topic of Polish photography with me: Krzysztof Jurecki, Marika Kuzmicz, Adam Mazur, Cezary Piekary, Krzysztof Pijarski, Adam Sobota, Józef Robakowski, and Andrzej Różycki, all of whom have contributed to the content of this thesis. Thank you to Juliet Hacking for distracting me with the offer of employment, and for providing invaluable counsel, and also for setting me on the path of Polish photography nearly a decade ago. I must also thank colleagues at the National Portrait Gallery for their continued support. Finally, without the unwavering encouragement and support of family and friends, both present and now absent, this thesis would not have been possible. James, I promised you that one day this PhD would be finished… your determination in the face of adversity has been truly inspirational. To Babcia and Dziadz, this thesis is dedicated to you. Kocham ciȩ serdecznie. 3 4 ABSTRACT This thesis draws on psychoanalytic theories of trauma to interrogate works produced by Polish photographers after the Second World War. The aim of this thesis is to excavate traces of trauma latently embedded in post-war Polish art photography. By closely analysing a selection of photographs produced between the years 1945 and 1970, I argue that the events of the war cast a shadow over the lives of Polish artists. Rather than looking at photographs which directly visualise these traumatic events, I explore the ways in which these experiences manifest themselves indirectly or obliquely in the art of the period, through abstraction, a tendency towards ‘dark realism,’ and an interest in traces of human presence. The events of the war were not the only traumas to cast their shadow on the Polish psyche. Between 1945 and 1970, Poland underwent a series of transitions and changes in leadership, population and Party politics. Periods of optimism and leniency oscillated with phases of repression and social unrest. In my analysis, I suggest that multiple traumas can be discerned in these decades. What is at stake in this thesis is the proposition that a photograph can bear imperceptible traces of events that have wounded the psyche, which could not be articulated at the time, but which were made visible at a later date. Photographs made in the post-war years provided a space to belatedly return to encrypted traumas, to relay ideas that could not otherwise be articulated, and to acknowledge events that had been disavowed. WORD COUNT: 70,618 5 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements 3 Abstract 5 Introduction: Exposing Wounds 9 I. Modern Polish Photography 31 II. 1. Step into Modernity 69 2. Dark Realism 78 3. Formal Frolics 99 4. Anti-Photography 125 III. 1. Subjective Photography 149 2. Forge 176 Conclusion 207 Bibliography 215 7 8 INTRODUCTION: EXPOSING WOUNDS From the dim recesses, as if from the abyss of Hell, there started to emerge people who had died long time ago and memories of events that, as in a dream, had no explanation, no beginning, no end, no cause or effect. They would emerge and keep returning stubbornly, as if waiting for my permission to let them enter. I gave them my consent. I understood their nature. I understood where they were coming from. The i m p r i n t s impressed deeply in the memorial past. (Tadeusz Kantor, Excerpt from ‘Imprints,’ Silent Night (Cricotage), 1990)1 The etymology of trauma derives from the Greek τραῦμα, meaning ‘wound’. Trauma is still used in medical contexts to denote physical damage to the body. It has also come to be used to denote psychological damage; a wound inflicted upon the mind. In his influential writings on trauma, Sigmund Freud suggested that a wound of the mind does not heal in the same way as a wound of the body.2 It is also more difficult to recognise and to comprehend. In fact, one of the salient features of trauma is its 1 Tadeusz Kantor, A Journey Through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos, 1944-1990, ed. and trans. Michal Kobialka (Berkeley: California University Press, 1993), 182. 2 See Sigmund Freud, ‘From The History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1918[1914]) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001); Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) (New York: Bantam Books, 1967). 9 incomprehensibility. Freud suggested that there occur exceptions to ordinary experience, such as accidents or life threatening events, which the subject is unprepared for and which produce stimuli powerful enough to rupture the mind’s “protective shield.”3 Building on Freud’s insight, Cathy Caruth has described how a traumatic event is akin to a “breach in the mind’s experience of time, self and world,” by which the wounding event is “experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness.”4 Accounts from the liberation of Nazi German concentration camps in 1945 support this theory, and demonstrate a breakdown of both vision and language when confronted with the horrors of the camps. In April 1945 the British Army’s Film and Photographic Unit (AFPU) entered the camp at Bergen-Belsen and more than two hundred photographs were taken. One AFPU photographer, Sergeant Oakes, recalled his incomprehension at the scenes he saw: “...we couldn’t understand it. We had seen corpses, we had seen our own casualties, but these bloodless bodies ...”5 In her recent study of photographs taken at the liberation of the concentration camps, Barbie Zelizer documents how the first journalists at the camps struggled with the inadequacies of language to describe what they saw; she notes that “‘Words fail me’, was their repeated refrain.”6 While a traumatic event may be experienced bodily, it remains unassimilated by the conscious mind. Instead, an invisible ‘wound’ is inflicted on the subconscious psychic material, imprinting an invisible, inaccessible and indelible trace that lies dormant in the subconscious. Freud stated, “Even things that seem completely forgotten are present somehow and somewhere, and have merely been buried and inaccessible to the subject.” 7 The excerpt from Polish artist Tadeusz Kantor’s poem that begins this chapter articulates the way in which events can be retained or stored in the mind as “i m p r i n t s / impressed deeply / in the memorial past.” Kantor also recognised a particular feature of these impressions, namely that at a later date they re-emerge and “stubbornly” return with 3 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Chapter IV. Freud posited two different models of traumatic experience: childhood trauma relating to castration anxiety that forms part of psycho-sexual development; and the model of traumatic neurosis associated with war and severe accidents. My interest lies in the latter, although pscyho-sexual traumas will be touched upon in the second chapter. 4 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 4. 5 Sergeant Harry Oakes, AFPU, Imperial War Museum Sound Archive interview, accession no. 19888/4 reel 2. 6 Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through The Camera's Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1998), 85. 7 Sigmund Freud, “Constructions in Analysis” (1937), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol 23, ed. and trans., James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 260. 10 “no explanation.”8 Freud used the term nachträglichkeit, often translated as ‘deferred action’, to describe this peculiar temporal structure in which the original trauma is experienced retrospectively. A trigger in the present activates the imprinted trace and returns the trauma to the conscious mind. It is only at this later date that the original traumatic event reveals itself, at a time and distance removed from the laying down of its impression.9 Caruth summarised the paradox at the heart of traumatic experience, namely, “that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the form of belatedness.”10 In 2003 Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda reflected upon the 1957 release of his film Kanał [Canal], which recounted the tragic heroism of the Polish Home Army during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Wajda suggested that making the film was for him, and by implication his generation, a necessity. He simply stated, “we had to expose our wounds.”11 Wajda’s film focused on a particular moment in Polish history, when Polish resistance fighters had attempted to liberate Warsaw from German occupation, timed to coincide with the arrival of the Soviet Union’s Red Army.