“Reflection or Creation” from 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.

It has long gone unquestioned that photography's most important advantage is its mechanically produced objectivity. Enabled by precision that surpasses the capability of the human eye, a mechanical lens can record infinite smallness and cosmic distances, quick movements, and even otherwise imperceptible wavelengths. Thus, it might seem that objective photography exhausts the possibilities of this technique. Nevertheless, for years in artist studios, attempts have been made to tame photography's independence, to present only fleeting forms temporarily brought to life by the author, which no one else can witness or recreate in nature. These attempts enrich the language of photography and afford it a special position apart from its well-established status as document.

What I have in mind is the trend of photography that could be characterized as “creationist,” a trend that includes rayograms, photograms, heliographs, heliotypes, deformed and mysterious photos made by those authors who do not refer to known reality, but inspire a new one. Of photographers like Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy—and in Poland, Karol Hiller, Zbigniew Dłubak, and Andrzej Pawłowski—we ask the question: to what extent are they creators of their own works, and not of mirror reflections of the world? These authors agree that a photograph is a document. But they use photography's documentary quality not to recreate reality, rather to perpetuate forms created by their own hands. The documentary nature of the photographic process thus relates to the restricted zone of the studio's four walls. Photography ceases to be a registration tool exclusively and becomes also a susceptible material (tworzywo).¹

This fact, however, cannot mean that photography producing such elusive images becomes “abstract” like abstract painting. Painting— whether representational or abstract—always starts in the artist's imagination that materializes in paint on canvas. Meanwhile, photography is a process of recreation, the result of light on film. A photograph cannot come into being without a stimulus that appears before the film. Thus, the term abstract photography has no real justification, and it is not true that these photographers attempt to “extend” abstract painting. Instead, they simply play with photographic material, irritate its sensitivity to light, test its indifferent fidelity to every ray that hits it. They know well that nothing can be created that did not first exist before the ever-truthful film, and that only by directing the process can they shape the final result.

The photographer's desire to create images by camera does not change the fact that he [sic] uses elements of reality external to himself, even if at times those elements are selected and processed. The principle that connects these attempts is the ambition to register not objects, but one's own creative vision. Deforming images beyond any resemblance to reality results from the same dreams that led to the production of mysterious rayograms and heliographs and is a testament to the desire to express oneself by subduing objectivity.

The core of this “creationist” attitude, I believe, was expressed in 1916 by the American Photo-Secessionist Alvin Langdon Coburn, the photographer who caught flashes of light in the mirrors of a “vortoscope,” a toy similar to a kaleidoscope. Coburn expressed the ideas that influenced the further development of improvised photography. It was his ambition to attempt experiments on a par with the other arts:

Coburn's reasoning has become the reasoning of all experimental photographers. His own evolution—from the photographs of building fragments in New York, taken from the tops of the first skyscrapers (1913), to architectural blocks arranged to resemble cubist painting, to his “vortographs” (1917)—reflects the path of development of studio photography in general. Ezra Pound, in the [unattributed] introduction to the catalog of Coburn's exhibition in London, suggested that his creative path was, like the transformation of painting and poetry, inspired to a large extent by contemporary music, by its freedom to use any sound.³

Three attitudes characterize the motives by which similar attempts would continue to develop. The first approach, which treats the photographic technique as an area of improvisation, magic, and play, is represented by Man Ray. The second, an experimental attitude, traces the possibilities of photographic technique, seeking a controlled “language of light” that will yield the greatest possible artistic qualities. The spokesmen for this approach were László Moholy-Nagy, and in Poland, Karol Hiller. Finally, the third attitude is devoted to finding expressive and poetic value inspired both by images of free light and fragments of reality. It manifests itself in the work of Polish avant-garde photographers from several years ago, as well as in the “subjective photography” promoted in Western Europe in the 1950s.

[…]

Regarding the secrets of the darkroom, the third type of “studio” photography best accentuates the expressive qualities of photographic language, the capacity to formulate poetic statements. Proponents of this attitude want to intensify the meaning of photographic vision, allowing associations closer to the viewer's experience to emerge. They believe these associations form the very condition for an emotional response.

In the interwar period Man Ray sensed that, with the help of certain procedures such as solarization, it would be possible to employ motifs found in reality to express additional, barely articulated emotional content. Apart from him, few have tried to merge the expressive power of the object's form and the possibilities of Surrealist interpretation. If a photographic image was transformed, it was generally only with the goal of achieving the illusion of a painted surface, most often in a pseudo-impressionistic style, or of creating an atmosphere akin to symbolism.

These desires were best expressed by Moholy-Nagy in the last pages of Vision in Motion. Under the influence of the psychoanalytic theory popular in intellectual circles in America, at the end of his life he took up the role of the subconscious in the creative act. He traced the role of the subconscious on photography, a branch of art he considered equally momentous to literature, painting, and film. The following passages illustrate Moholy's views:

In this way, Moholy's earlier approach, which could be described as rooted in engineering, transformed into the belief that photography can and should express the author's feelings. Once again, the issue of photography's documentary capacity arises. Photography ceases to be a trace of technical procedures, or a faithful image of the everyday world, and becomes an expression of a personal relationship to reality.

One of the most active scenes embracing photography as intimate confession was a group of young Polish photographers working in Warsaw and Poznań in the years 1948-49. This [artistic] milieu, whose views were articulated by Zbigniew Dłubak, distinguished themselves from Man Ray and early Moholy, whose rayograms and photograms they believed no longer fulfilled an important role in relation to the viewer. Rather, they still believed in photography's capacity to convey scenes that viewers could not find in nature, only adding that the author should seek a new common language with the viewer. The concept of a photographic document, they claimed, should defer to subjective phenomena, fleeting moods of an individual whose perceptions of the surrounding world are subject to deformation and whose attention is sometimes focused on emotions uniquely experienced, but who can somehow express them through metaphor, a subtle articulation. On the other hand, they believed that through an overemphasis on literal, insignificant details and conventionalism, what was known as artistic photography had become an overly superficial representation of the present.

The participants of the group consciously referred to certain assumptions of Surrealist ideology, to a concept of art as recording personal experience, as a way of mutual understanding by way of understatements, always leaving a margin of mystery, calculated for the independent operation of the recipient's fantasies. Generally speaking, they held the belief that truly creative photography can share the theoretical premises of modern art, and that it should draw conclusions from the evolution of artistic movements.

But what most profoundly justified change in photography, they claimed, was the need to understand its own rights. They sought the right to search for motifs inaccessible to common photography and which painters never dreamed of—macrophotography, or other scientific documents—and the right to ignore the painting conventions that they understood as restrictive. These two rights explained each other: going beyond subjects common to everyday photography and naturalistic painting, the modern photographer was compelled to create new artistic criteria for his own use. For how could macroscopic photos, recordings of chemical processes, or mirrored flashes of light conform to those conventions of classical composition, harmony, or perspective?

These Polish photographers—Zbigniew Dłubak, Fortunata Obrąpalska, and others—characteristically linked objective, nearly scientific approaches and lyrical, poetic atmospheres with great expressive power. In this way their approach was remarkably original on the European scale. Dłubak, inspired by the worldview of the Surrealists, provided his photos with titles derived from poetry, for example “Magellan Heart” by Pablo Neruda. He sought to direct the viewer's attention to his own perception of painful matters, his obsession with tragic human fate. The expressive power of Dłubak's works was largely due to the fact that they were devoid of additional expressionist effects and that they were always photographs. For instance, he enlarged images of real, existing structures to a scale unknown to man. Searching for artistically interesting motifs, and skillfully manipulating them through cropping and depth of field, he transformed a shred of fibers or some plant forms into visual metaphors. The viewer received Dłubak's vision in two ways: as an objective document of the real, identifiable world, and simultaneously as a trace of the author's free associations.

The second figure, Fortunata Obrąpalska, worked in a scientific laboratory. She came to admire the effects of chemical processes while mixing liquids. Her photographs are captivating, subtle drawings, and at the same time retain the character of a document, free from embellishments or deformations. Like Dłubak, she was aware of the perspectives opening to photography, its capacity to stir the same undefinable, fleeting moods that were first discovered by the Surrealists. Obrąpalska achieved a more expressionist form in her solarizations, which differed from Man Ray's as hers were more distinctly literary—and more aggressive in their subject and deformation.

Edward Hartwig, Leonard Sempoliński, and several others also passed through the movement of Polish postwar avant-garde photography. Apart from several publications by Dłubak and others in the pages of Świat Fotografii [The World of Photography], this community's most important contribution was the exhibition Nowoczesna Fotografika Polska [Modern Polish Photography]. Dubbed behind the scenes as the “exhibition of madmen,” it opened in fall 1948 in Warsaw and featured the work of ten authors, among them Bułhak.⁵ The exhibition caused quite a stir on the photo scene. Its most significant outcome was the subsequent inclusion of several photographers in Wystawa Sztuki Nowoczesnej [Exhibition of Modern Art] in Kraków in 1948-49. As an important exhibition for the Polish avant-garde art movement, Wystawa Sztuki Nowoczesnej warrants some additional discussion. Exhibited alongside paintings by Maria Jarema, Tadeusz Kantor, Jonasz Stern, Jerzy Tchórzewski, Marian Bogusz, and a dozen other painters were photographs by Obrąpalska, Dłubak, Sempoliński, and Hartwig. For the first time in Poland, photographers and painters found a common language based on mutual respect; they could become partners. The presence of the photographic works in the exhibition was a testament to the equal importance of artistic and photographic research. The exhibition also included enlargements of scientific photographs, which, as the catalog stated, “show a world that is as much the world of the artist as that of the scientist-researcher or practitioner-technician.”⁶ The exhibition thus demonstrated the belief that modern art, science, and technology share an outlook, and that the language of photography has the capacity to shape the vision of contemporary man.

The Kraków exhibition, although not widely known, was an event of European scale in the history of avant-garde photography's contact with the latest art. It was nearly as important as Film und Foto in Stuttgart in 1929, or the grand Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936. In 1957, photographic works again were included in an exhibition of Polish painting in II Wystawa Sztuki Nowoczesnej [The Second Exhibition of Modern Art] in Warsaw. It featured new practices that had emerged in the years since the first exhibition, including Marek Piasecki's heliographs and Andrzej Pawłowski's photograms.

The artists of this slightly younger generation, who had begun making work in the 1950s, include above all Zdzisław Beksiński, a painter and sculptor as well as photographer and author of heliotypes. Beksiński considers the graphic process of making heliotypes akin to making monotypes, only that the copying in this case is photographic. His prints gain the qualities of photographic paper—its tonality and sharpness of line—not unlike Hiller's heliography.

What is striking in Beksiński's works from 1957-60 is their exploration of the human psyche, stubbornly snooping in its nooks and crannies. Lonely faces are isolated on black or white backgrounds that absorb any secondary details of the environment. In his desire to fully express his obsessions, Beksiński deformed the picture and heightened contrast, but never deprived it of its character as a cruel document. To make the meaning of his photographs even more poignant, Beksiński juxtaposed them with ordinary, anonymous documentary images, for example criminal mugshots, travel photography, even reproductions of selected texts. He believed that only what unites them, what the viewer senses between them, is important. This type of juxtaposition of photographic material connects Beksiński's activity to Surrealism, and to films consisting of broken motifs. His series are akin to scripts for imaginary thematic exhibitions. As a “screenwriter,” Beksiński assigned anonymous material an important role, revealing the striking universality of human experience, misfortune, and anxieties.

Bronisław Szlabs was another proponent of “poetic photography” by way of photograms, comparable to an abstract graphic artist who leaves white symbols and tangles on a black background. However, no printmaking technique could ever give Szlabs the freedom he found in photographic material to define sharp contrasts of shiny whites and intense blacks.

Perhaps the most difficult to define is the work of Marek Piasecki, author of heliographs and miniatures that are to a greater or lesser degree related to the photographic process. Heliographs consist of traces of liquid or other transparent models on photosensitive film. They are mechanical recordings, for instance of a drawing that can later be transferred to a print. Miniatures, on the other hand, result from the direct influence of chemicals or other stimuli on photographic paper, or affixing various “foreign bodies” onto the paper. Piasecki brings to life the world of various shapes and values, preserves states of concentration and traces of treatments carried out on the photosensitive surface. His work is full of ambiguous, suggestive allusions. Through his overworked compositions—both prints of heliographs as well as images created directly on photosensitive paper, embellished with additional color and collage—Piasecki suggests delicate, elusive phenomena. At the same time, his process achieves original effects in the field of values and iridescent colors.

Piasecki also makes photography that we could literally call “poetic” by creating and collecting strange models and directing mysterious situations. His activity, fundamentally based on the goal of self-expression, at the same time establishes a mutual understanding with the viewer, one based on shared feelings and associations at the sight of unusual situations or objects. Piasecki's work in this vein echoes the Dadaist games with “ready-made objects” that Man Ray so enthusiastically immortalized in his photographs.

There are no rules for “poetic” photography. There are many discovered and as yet undiscovered possibilities for subordinating photographic language to various moods and temperaments. Certainly there are many original artists who expertly control the effects of photographic materials. This creative material, as we have seen, need not necessarily be devoted to subjects alien to common perception. Indeed, sometimes the material is used to estrange, as in the works of Edward Weston. In his isolated fragments of nature, nudes, plants, and sea dunes, the artist suggests that, in addition to the beauty of the form, he was struck by the atmosphere accompanying a given motif. It seems that, of all the artistic circles in the world, it is Americans who sense these things most thoroughly. Among them, besides Weston, we should mention Harry Callahan. Once Moholy's successor as a professor at the Institute of Design (New Bauhaus), Callahan now educates young photographers in Rhode Island, off the eastern coast of the United States. His “multiple images” are marked by mystery and a poetic mood. In his works, nature is combined with the female figure who appears like a ghost among the grasses, and overlapping people and cars suggest tense metropolitan life. Although Callahan's vision is realized by means of photography, the interpenetration of images is a unique product of imagination and atmosphere. Its advantage is the great clarity of vision and the delicate rendering of each shape. William Carlos Williams, on seeing Callahan's pictures, exclaimed: “Jesus! Peter Brueghel would have given his left arm to have painted the world so clearly, so beautifully!”⁷

One of the great camera poets is another former Man Ray apprentice, Bill Brandt. He too interprets selected nature fragments, alters the relationship between man and environment, and distorts the perspective in which we are used to seeing the human face and body, thereby achieving an acute tension in his photographs.

[…] The impulse to expand the language of poetic photography is ongoing in many countries […] The convergence of the various groups’ arguments with the arguments of Polish artist-photographers working in 1948-49 demonstrates a common need that troubles many ambitious creators, testifying to the seriousness and timeliness of these searches undertaken in our country.

Translated by Joanna Szupinska. This text is an excerpt selected by the translator. Originally published in Polish by Urszula Czartoryska as “Reflection or Creation” in The Artistic Adventures of Photography (Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1965), 57-95. Olga Stanisławska graciously agreed to authorize this translation. In the final stage, Magdalena Moskalewicz offered astute notes that engendered additional precision to the translation.