The Photograph as Susceptible Material: An Introduction to “Reflection OR Creation” from Urszula Czartoryska's The Artistic Adventures of Photography Free

In her 1965 essay “Lustro rzeczywistości czy uległe tworzywo” [mirror of reality, or submissive material], presented here in its first English translation as “Reflection or Creation,” Urszula Czartoryska investigates the photographic medium's capacity for creative intervention. Among her case studies are Polish photographers Karol Hiller, Zbigniew Dłubak, and Fortunata Obrąpalska, who she situates as interconnected, international artists working within a context that encompasses France, Germany, and the Soviet Union. The introduction to the translation argues that Czartoryska's approach not only sought to legitimize Polish photography within a broader history of modernism, but also created the conditions of possibility for future forms of artistic subjectivity in a socialist context.

In “Reflection or Creation,” the central chapter in her history of photography, the Polish curator and critic Urszula Czartoryska investigates the photographic medium's capacity for creative intervention. Acknowledging the notion of photographs as “reflections” of the world, she moves quickly to her true concern: namely, the photograph as subjective “creation,” a polemical idea in a region that advocated realism in government policy. Among her case studies are Polish photographers Karol Hiller, Zbigniew Dłubak, and Andrzej Pawłowski, whom she situates as interconnected, international artists working within a context that encompasses France, Germany, and the Soviet Union. At stake in this gesture is not only the legitimation of their work within a broader history of photographic modernism, but also the creation of conditions of possibility for future forms of artistic subjectivity in a socialist context. Arguably, the explosion of neo-avant-garde practices in Poland in the late 1960s and 70s, and the central role afforded photography in those forms, is built on the foundation Czartoryska offers in this chapter.

Published in 1965, The Artistic Adventures of Photography (Przygody plastyczne fotografii)¹ appeared in the wake of the so-called Polish Thaw. The mandate for Socialist Realism in Poland was overturned at that time, and the nation's artistic community sought to recover earlier lines of inquiry and to build new connections. Czartoryska's book offers a chronological narrative of the history of photography, with the socialist Polish People's Republic (PRL) situated productively between the polestars of France and the Soviet Union. Well-researched and international in scope, Artistic Adventures became the authoritative history of photography in the PRL and, as the state's restrictions on art waxed and waned over the following decades, a veritable cult classic. Photo historian Adam Mazur recalls that copies of the book “sold from under the counter” and circulated among readers who assiduously pored over its pages, “influencing a whole generation of artists.”²

Who was Urszula Czartoryska?³ Born in 1934 near Poznań, Czartoryska earned her master's degree in art history from the Catholic University of Lublin in 1956. Immediately after graduating, she joined the editorial board of the Warsaw-based journal Fotografia. There she developed into a formidable critic, scholar, and editor, and became a central voice in heated debates about the nature of photography as an art form. Photography was, at this time, primarily considered by museums as a form of evidence, to be collected by historical societies and archives, not art institutions.⁴ In the process, Czartoryska “expertly navigated her way through the [contemporaneous] artistic and cognitive theories and was able to situate typically Polish phenomena against a broader context of modern humanities,” writes Agata Ciastoń.⁵Artistic Adventures was the culmination of a decade of scholarship and critical advocacy, and dispositive proof for her side in the fight.

Arguing her case meant recovering key artists from the history of Polish photographic modernism and locating them within broader international movements. The volume's cover bears four disparate images spanning the century narrated within. The front shows a photograph of a man and an abstract composition made using experimental techniques; on the back are a photographic study for a painting and a still from an animated short. The title of the book seems to borrow its phrasing from the American photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, who in a 1962 lecture had characterized his own career as a series of “photographic adventures.” However, Czartoryska alters his idea of an individual artist's photographic adventures to write about photography's artistic adventures, thus personifying the medium and imbuing it with agency.⁶

Czartoryska's core thesis is that photography—taken to include both documentary images and photomontage—inevitably intrudes into the artistic creativity of other spheres. Traversing various genres and artistic movements, the book also addresses what are now considered classic photographic debates, discussing realism and abstraction, indexicality and documentation, image and text, speed, materiality, and reproducibility. To this end, Czartoryska demonstrates a mastery of the existing literature on these subjects in Polish, French, German, and English, including writers such as Roland Barthes, Beaumont Newhall, Siegfried Kracauer, the Austrian theorist Karl Pawek, and the Polish photographer and writer Zbigniew Dłubak.

Notable, too, are certain absences. Czartoryska emphasizes mass reproduction, but her discussion does not include a consideration of Walter Benjamin, despite her verbose explanation of a concept that might be summarized as photography's “optical unconscious.”⁷ John Szarkowski also does not figure; he had only recently assumed his role as head of the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Photography. More surprisingly, there is no mention of Edward Steichen's exhibition The Family of Man, even though the exhibition had toured to seven cities in Poland in 1959-60.

The book proceeds across five chapters. The first two cover a history familiar to the Western reader. “The Limits of Photography” addresses developments up to World War I. Czartoryska's 19th century is overwhelmingly French—she discusses Louis Daguerre as the inventor of photography, as well as Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Degas, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Jean-François Millet, and Nadar—and she connects this history to Poland by way of Pictorialist Jan Bułhak, a prominent Polish photographer and theorist whose work spans the first half of the 20th century. The second chapter, “Photography Takes on New Functions,” is devoted to early-20th-century avant-gardes, across a somewhat expanded geography: Cubism, Surrealism, Dada, Futurism, and New Objectivity. This history nevertheless is grounded in Western Europe, with occasional excursions to New York—for instance, the Armory Show of 1913, Stieglitz's gallery 291, and his journal Camera Work—and references to developments in Central Europe and Russia.

The third and fourth chapters present the West and the East as they converge in Central Europe; it is here that the true subject of the book makes itself known. “Reflection or Creation,” from which I have selected key passages, is the book's third chapter. It explores the ramifications of photography as producing, simultaneously, mechanical recordings and individually authored visual objects. Photography's objectivity is its “most important advantage,” the chapter begins. But artists use the medium as no longer “a registration tool exclusively,” but “also [as] a susceptible material.”⁸ Czartoryska discusses this pliability by way of techniques as disparate as camera-less photography, solarization, photomontage, and staged photography, connecting these practices to the efforts of the avant-garde in chapter 2.

Central to her account in “Reflection or Creation” is the idea of photography as a medium for, as she puts it, “self-expression,” a phenomenon she discovers in case studies of Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, Otto Steinert, and Harry Callahan. These examples should make clear, however, that self-expression was, on Czartoryska's terms, not so much a matter of personal expression as the consolidation of individual authorship in the photographic field, taking the form of play (Man Ray), experimentation (Moholy-Nagy), or subjective and poetic pursuits (Steinert and Callahan). Notably, she uses interchangeably the words photographer, creator, and author—word choices that I have preserved for texture in the following translation.⁹

Alongside the chapter's brief introduction, presented here in its first English translation, is the critical final section of “Reflection or Creation.” In it, Czartoryska considers experimental photography made in Poland in the post-Stalinist late-1950s, during the first years of liberalization following the protests and riots in 1956. Works by Polish artists such as Fortunata Obrąpalska and Zdzisław Beksiński— who are featured on the book cover—are the focus. Inspired by her work as a chemist, Obrąpalska made photographs of drops of ink dissolving in jars of water. In Tancerka II (Dancer II), the inverted composition suggests a woman's silhouette. Printed in negative, the ink drops appear white on a dark field and are further abstracted through solarization.¹⁰ Beksiński, now best known for fantastical dystopian paintings beloved by black metal bands, was an accomplished photographer until he renounced the medium in the 1960s. His flat backgrounds convey boredom, disillusionment, psychological despair, and social decline through a characteristic “dark realism.”¹¹

To summarize what follows in the book: The fourth chapter, “Raw Material in the Graphics Workshop,” considers photography as a readymade material used in photomontage, agitprop, animated film, stage sets, and commercial design. The fifth and final chapter, “Photography as Human Speech,” is devoted to reprising the main artistic debates, organized around Czartoryska's idea of photography sneaking into art as a “trojan horse,” bringing with it “an independent [photographic] force.”¹² She concludes with a consideration of the photographic “as it touches people every day through the media, making a much greater impact [on their daily lives] than painting or the other arts,”¹³ an argument that remarkably prefigures visual and cultural studies.¹⁴ Rethinking her earlier assertions, she argues that just as photography had a transformative effect on art, so too has photography-as-art impacted the mass media.

What accounts for the book's influence in Poland? How did it become a cult object? Notably, the work never explicitly addresses politics. Writing about the experiments of the Soviet Constructivists, Czartoryska does not mention the October Revolution. Stalinist purges do not figure, nor does the Cold War.¹⁵ Rather, the book served as a counterweight to state demands that art practice be politicized. Czartoryska's emphasis on self-expression and individual authorship thereby built the historical groundwork for the counterculture-inflected Conceptual art that would emerge in Poland in the 1970s.

So, too, may Czartoryska's ongoing work have played an important role. Soon after the book was published, she married Ryszard Stanisławski in 1966, the same year that he became the director of the influential Muzeum Sztuki (Museum of Art) in Łódź (they had met in 1957, toward the end of his second marriage—to the sculptor Alina Szapocznikow).¹⁶ Shortly after their daughter Olga was born in 1967, Czartoryska and her family moved to Łódź, where they ran the museum together. They descended from their onsite apartment into the modern art galleries as if walking into their own living room, and inviting artists upstairs into their home was equally effortless. During receptions, the story goes, Czartoryska served homemade soup, further blurring any separation between work and home life.

If Stanisławski was the museum's visionary, Polish artists of the era are fond of recalling, Czartoryska was its heart and soul. For that first decade in Łódź, she worked as an independent scholar and critic, conducting her own research while traveling with her husband on museum business. In 1977, she formally joined the museum staff as the first director and curator of the new Department of Photography and Visual Techniques, a position she held until her death in 1998.¹⁷ It was the first such department in a Polish art museum.¹⁸ She immediately got to work on acquisitions.¹⁹ She built a collection addressing the broad history of photography, acquiring 19th-century photographs, photo-report-age, and modern fine art prints—thereby concretizing in the form of a collection the history that Artistic Adventures had assembled, and shaping the discourses around photography in Poland into the present.

Most importantly, though, Artistic Adventures is a testament to the specificity of how the idea of photography-as-art developed in postwar Eastern Europe. The legacies of the avant-garde unfolded differently in Poland from elsewhere, in a way that linked, rather than distinguished between, Surrealist sensibilities and the logic of agitprop. Expressive and materialist approaches, Czartoryska argued, developed together. In Poland, photocollage and photomontage are seen as central to photography's history. Licensed by her sharp view of this history, the readers of her book were free to conceive neo-avant-garde collages and photomontages, installations, conceptual performances, and experimental films— thereby, to wander on artistic adventures well beyond the traditional photographic frame.