(05.06.1940, Kielce – 10.08.2019, Warsaw)
Photographer and designer. A member of the Association of Polish Artists since 1972. He was involved in advertising photography, designed book and album covers, postcards, calendars and posters. He reproduced Polish paintings for catalogs and popular science albums. He performed commissions for the National Publishing Agency (Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza), the Auriga publishing house and the National Ossolinski Institute. He collaborated with artists of various backgrounds, such as Krzysztof Gierałtowski, Jakub Erol and Joachim Sokólski. He carried out many projects with his wife Waldyna Fleischmann, who specialized in arranging commercial exhibitions – she designed pavilions for both Polish and foreign expositions, among others for Polexpo.
Youth. Between Poland and France
Jan Fleischmann’s father was Jan Alfred Wojciech Fleischmann, captain of the infantry administration of the Polish Army, posthumously promoted to the rank of major, participant in the Battle of the Bzura, who fell near Przesławice on September 17, 1939. His mother’s name was Kazimiera Janina, born Płoszaj. After the war ended, Kazimiera moved with her son to her hometown of Wloclawek. Jan had his own camera as a child, and during his teenage years he happened to present his photographs in competitions. In the following years his passion did not die out, although he took up architectural education. In 1960 he entered the Faculty of Architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology. However, he quickly changed his mind and moved to the Faculty of Interior Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, from which he graduated in 1965. He completed his diploma thesis under the direction of Włodzimierz Wittek in 1971. It turned out to be a great opportunity to deepen his knowledge of photographic technology – the project was entitled “Pavilion: studio – laboratory – projection. To practice on color reversal photographic material”. Interior Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts was also studied by Waldyna. At the end of her education, she presented “Portable rack for displaying industrial products. Equipment for exhibitions of trade and industry”.
They both defended their diplomas with a few years of slippage, as they left for France in 1965, where they lived for the next four years. Their emigration was made possible by Jan Fleischmann’s mother’s sister, Maria, who married a Frenchman before World War II and lived with him. This was not the photographer’s first visit to France – he visited his aunt several times during his childhood. There he took a job in an architectural studio as a draftsman – first in Dreux, a town 80 kilometers west of Paris, and then in Paris itself. He devoted his free time to photography. He set up a darkroom in the bathroom of the small attic apartment he rented with Waldyna. The designer couple got married at the beginning of their stay, in 1965. The wedding took place at the Polish church Église Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption on rue Saint-Honoré in Paris. Finally, however, in 1969, the Fleischmanns returned to Poland and settled in Warsaw. In 1974, a son, Piotr, was born to them.
Cooperation with the National Publishing Agency
Jan Fleischmann was the type of artist constantly pursuing further education and professionalism. He collected specialized Polish and foreign literature, for example, he subscribed to the German magazine “International Photo Technik”. He also invested in professional photographic equipment. When, in 1971, with Krzysztof Gierałtowski and Krzysztof Lenk, he made a lucrative commission for a poster and a catalog cover for the German lighting company Erco, he spent the money he earned on a Hasselblad camera with several lenses, a large-format Sinar camera and Braun lights.
He approached his projects in no different way, although inevitably, in the Poland of the 1970s and 1980s, he struggled with material limitations. He set up his studio in one of the rooms in his apartment – he blacked out the windows in it, gathered lighting equipment and various backgrounds. Fleischmann had great reserves of ingenuity, which, combined with an expert workshop, allowed him to bypass difficulties and realize original works of applied art. Many of them were commissioned by the National Publishing Agency. Fleischmann made greeting cards, postcards and posters for it. The most notable project, however, was the design of covers for the so-called “pink series” of detective books, published between 1975 and 1990. During this period Jan Fleischmann and Waldyna worked on the graphic design of 87 books – in most cases they took the photos for the cover, and often did the typographic layout. The compositions photographed in the home studio referred to the plot of the books, which Jan meticulously read (according to the artists’ son, Waldyna rather familiarized herself with the content from her husband’s summaries). The Fleischmanns created them from everyday objects, the photographs show toy guns, banknotes, dark glasses, miniature cars, playing cards or lego models. In addition, they reached for a variety of technical tricks: they formed collages, played with multicolored lights, photographed from unobvious perspectives, used double exposure. As a result, the reader was supposed to feel the mood of mystery and sensation, but put through the filter of irony – after all, the idea was to illustrate a casual detective story. The designers managed to develop a consistent style of covers – “pink series” cannot be confused with any other.
Fleischmann was also able to adapt his workshop skills and inventiveness to educational purposes – as part of his work with the National Publishing Agency, he developed the visual layer of popular science publications. An example of this type of publication is an album On crystals, atoms and electrons by Artur Szczepanski from 1979. Despite appearances, there was a simple trick behind the attractive illustrations of physics lessons included in the book. In order to visualize the workings of particles to the layman, the photographer painted yellow, blue and red, then arranged and photographed dozens of ordinary ping-pong balls on a black background. In the context of popular science literature, it is also worth mentioning a less spectacular, but very important, part of the artist’s output, which was the photography of Polish paintings. Fleischmann’s reproductions adorn albums of the Auriga publishing house or the Ossoline National Institute, studies by art historians such as Kazimierz Olszanski and Wieslaw Juszczak, still standing on the shelves of our home libraries.
Specialist in everything which is “new and the newest”
In addition to working with the National Publishing Agency, Fleischmann was involved in advertising photography of everyday objects and designing their visual side. In doing so, he did not limit himself to one discipline. In the photographer’s archive we can find, among other things, photos of stockings, produced by the “Feniks” hosiery factory in Lodz of two-component styloon fibers, fabricated at the “Stilon” factory in Gorzow, preparations for car care (both shoots appeared in the magazine “New and the Newest. Chemical Magazine for Everyone”), photographs presenting Pollena brand cosmetics or Joachim Sokólski’s jewelry. In addition, Fleischmann was responsible for the design of the cover of the board game Mastermind, made the patterns of the wrappers for vinyl records of the Tonpress publishing house, prepared the cover of the calendar of the Telkom Telecommunications Industry Union for 1977, and also created film posters, such as the one advertising the festival 50 years of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in filmmaking (In collaboration with Jakub Erol) or for the comedy Man – Woman. Wanted by Stanisław Bareja from 1972.
Work on the archive
The rich legacy of Jan and Waldyna Fleischmann was taken care of by the Archeology of Photography Foundation in 2021. In September of that year, it played an important role in the exhibition of applied photography from the FAF’s collection O kryminałach, kryształach i innych przedmiotach, curated by Marta Przybylo. More than half of the works on display came from the Fleischmanns’ archives (25 out of 48), and their collaboration with the National Photo Agency inspired the show’s title, which was the first step toward remembering the profiles of the pair of prominent designers.
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The text was prepared by Mikolaj Chmielinski, 31.10.2023.
