Lucjan Demidowski (born 1946) – photographer based in Lublin, active since the 1960s. Member of the Association of Polish Art Photographers since 1971 (membership card no. 383). One of the leading figures in Polish conceptual photography, as well as a Lublin reporter and chronicler of the local artistic life.
From having fun in the darkroom to a small moral scandal. First steps
Demidowski first came into contact with photography thanks to his older friends from the neighborhood, who showed him how to make prints in a darkroom. It was a formative experience – the appearance of an image on a sheet of photosensitive paper seemed like magic. Shortly thereafter, in 1960, Demidowski received a camera as a gift from his father – a Soviet Zorkij 2S. He used it to take his first photographs.
In the following years, the young photographer developed his skills at the “Zamek” Photo Club, operating at the Castle in Lublin. During this time, he took part in numerous competitions and photographic exhibitions. He also followed important artistic events, for example, he visited the famous “Subjective Photography” exhibition in Warsaw in 1968.
An important moment in Demidowski’s career was his solo exhibition “Obnażenie”, organized at the Municipal Cultural Center in Lublin in 1970. The photographer presented nude photographs – from small prints to large formats exceeding 1.5 meters – which filled the entire walls of the gallery. The exhibition opening attracted a large audience. As a journalist from the magazine “Kamena” reported: “The corridor of the Municipal Cultural Center could barely accommodate all those hungry for sensation, as the local gossip promised a lot of lustful nudity, which may not be so difficult to find in our city, but rather in sports and party situations than in artistic ones.”1. As a result of the atmosphere that had built up around the exhibition, the censor decided to end it prematurely. This decision was met with criticism from the Lublin journalistic community, as in reality the photographs were far from pornographic. The young photographer freely constructed montage compositions, transforming female bodies into graphic symbols. As it was written: “Demidowski, with an excellent sense of spatial tensions, transformed the female body into harmonious sets of forms, without depriving it of its taste of life and biological vitality.”2. The censor finally bowed to pressure and the exhibition was reopened.
The photographer included most of the works from “Obnażenie” in his portfolio submitted to the recruitment committee of the Association of Polish Art Photographers in March 1971. The committee consisted of the leading authorities in photography at the time: it was chaired by Zbigniew Łagocki, and assisted by Zbigniew Dłubak, Jerzy Lewczyński, Natalia LL, and Wiesław Prażuch. Demidowski passed the demanding exam and joined the Association on his first attempt.
Konary, kamienie i lustra. Rzut oka na kilka wystaw
In the 1970s, the photographer made his mark on the professional art scene, showing his work at solo exhibitions in galleries promoting new trends and participating in important group shows. His membership in the Association of Polish Art Photographers enabled him to participate in the famous exhibition “Fotografowie poszukujący”, which was presented in January 1971 at the Contemporary Gallery in Warsaw, and then in countries such as Germany, France, and Japan. Demidowski’s photographs were included in the avant-garde collection later, during the world tour (they were first shown at Photokina in Cologne), because at the time of the Polish edition of the exhibition, the photographer did not yet have the Union membership card required of participants.
In 1972, the BWA in Lublin hosted Demidowski’s solo exhibition entitled “Autoportret” (“Self-Portrait”). Its centerpiece was a double self-portrait of the artist, composed of two photographs. The work was unique not only because of the montage technique used, but above all because of its later fate. It became a prop in a spontaneous action leading to reflection on the materiality of the medium – Demidowski decided to destroy it using various methods, for example, by immersing it in water or splashing it with purple ink. The exhibition was well received, and the photographer was honored with the Voivodeship Art Award for it. Its intermedia nature attracted attention, and the justification for the verdict reads: “By awarding Lucjan Demidowski’s exhibition ‘Self-Portrait’, the jury wishes to express its conviction that all rigid divisions into artistic disciplines are anachronistic today, and that humanistic issues are at the center of contemporary artistic sensibility.”
Demidowski’s artistic presentations often went beyond the traditional model of displaying photographs on walls. The solo exhibition “Garden,” organized at the Labirynt Gallery in Lublin in March 1973, was also enriched with a performative accent. On a large section of the gallery wall, the photographer presented a set of 72 prints depicting dark, leafless tree branches. This was contrasted with a small clump of living grass sown in a crack in the floor of the room, illuminated by a spotlight and watered during the exhibition. In his work, Demidowski took advantage of local conditions – he did not dig a hole specifically for this purpose, and the plant had previously grown in the vicinity of the gallery and was returned to the same place at the end.
At that time, Zbigniew Dłubak was an important figure for the young artist. With his “Tautologies” in 1973, Demidowski entered into an artistic and intellectual dialogue on the illusory nature of the photographic image. He highlighted the deceptive potential of seemingly truthful photography in his series “Scale 1:1,” part of a broader cycle entitled “Real-Apparent.” As part of this project, he took photographs of a white sheet of paper with the inscription “1:1” placed in various settings – on a wall, on a tree, in bushes, etc. At first glance, the sheet was always the same size, but in reality it only occupied the same area of the changing image – expanding and contracting. This game with perception is continued in experiments with mirrors, which make it difficult for the viewer to determine the location of the photographed objects and spaces.
Another characteristic feature of the photographer’s work is his interest in the process itself. This is most clearly evident in the works created for the exhibition “Transfigurations”, organized again at the Labirynt Gallery in 1975. Some of them were arranged in sequence and compiled in the form of small books hanging on a string, so that turning the pages allowed the viewer to follow the titular transformation. One of the sequences, for example, showed a globe in the grass gradually moving away from the viewer, only to return in the form of a stone.
Stones, photographed since the 1970s, are, alongside mirrors, another hallmark of the artist. He is fascinated by their permanence, size, and immovability. Photographic meditation on stones became a way of emotional release during the martial law period. It was then that the series “Stones of Freedom” was created somewhere in the Kozubszczyzna region. A few years later, in February 1988, the photographs were given a second life. Demidowski and his friend Antoni Zdebiak (whose archive is also under the care of the APF) organized the “Drzewokradztwo i Kamieniokradztwo” action at the BWA gallery in Lublin. Zdebiak performed a dance with a broom in a designated area in the middle of the gallery hall, on photographic paper with chemicals poured on it. To glorify this ritual, Demidowski placed 50 x 50 cm prints on the walls around the room, imitating a stone circle.
Archive of textures, shapes, and forgotten objects. Working method
Looking through the photographer’s negatives, we come across close-ups of various textures, such as walls, trees, and water surfaces. This is due to his working method, which consists of collecting interesting fragments of reality, not always for reasons that are easy to explain, which may one day be creatively transformed. Sometimes, the photographer-collector’s interest turns to more tangible phenomena. For example, advertising poles with palimpsests of posters in Lublin and the surrounding area (Chełm, Parczew), documented in 1973.
Demidowski’s approach was greatly influenced by the idea of the “archaeology of photography” developed by his older friend Jerzy Lewczyński. Guided by this idea, he made reproductions of two childhood photographs from the private collection of a woman he met in Siedlce. The first, from 1947, depicted her, and the second, her daughter, photographed in 1974 in a similar place, dressed and hairstyled in a similar manner. The diptych was shown at the “Transfigurations” exhibition. Another “archaeological” gesture from around the same time was the rescue of a stack of damaged, glued-together glass negatives found in the attic of an old tenement house in Toruń. Demidowski managed to separate the plates by immersing them in water, but the images once preserved on them did not survive. The process of emulsion degradation transformed the images into amorphous structures. Captivated by the abstract forms, the artist kept the negatives and, years later, made prints from them. The discarded photographs, like other scraps fished out of the depths of everyday life, found their way into the photographer’s diverse and rich archive of curiosities. There they are waiting for further interventions.
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Lucjan Demidowski has been collaborating with the Archeology of Photography Foundation since 2024. Part of his extensive oeuvre has been catalogued and is available at the Virtual Museum of Photography.
The biographical note was prepared by Mikołaj Chmieliński based on an interview conducted with the artist and Weronika Kobylińska on October 29, 2024.
[1] IJK, Obnażenie, „Kamena” 1970, nr 24 10.
[2] Ibidem
[3] Nagroda dla Demidowskiego, „Kamena” 1972, nr 26 – 27, s. 2.
