news

The Archeology of Photography Foundation presents its latest publication, EMULSION. Over eighty illustrations – archival photographs and selected contemporary works presented in the book tell the story of deterioration, operations performed by artists, and the materiality of photography. This subjective selection allows us to see how photographs described as “objects for conservation” take abstract forms and visually come across as something more than just a testimony of time.

We invite you to an afternoon with photography which takes place on October 4 between 4-6.30 pm at the Museum of Modern Art, 51 Emilii Plater St in Warsaw. It will be devoted to a double book launch: of Clément Chéroux’s The Vernacular. Essays in History of Photography by (publ. Archaelogy of Photography Foundation, 2014) and Between the Document and the Experiment. Photography in Polish Photographic Periodicals 1945-1989 by Karolina Ziębińska-Lewandowska (publ. Bęc Zmiana and Archaelogy of Photography, 2014.)

We invite you to the opening of the exhibition of photographs by Stefan Bursche. It will take place on November 7 (Friday) from 6 – 8pm at the FF Gallery in Łódź, 17 Traugutta St. The exhibition will be open until November 29, 2014. 
Stefan Bursche (1887-1940), a trained engineer, spent most of his life in Łódź and Pabianice, where he worked at the Geyer and Krusche & Ender textile companies. Privately, Bursche was an enthusiast of sightseeing trips, which he attended as a member of the Łódź Tourism Association and of the Łódź division of the Tatra Society. It is likely that it is these activities that led him to developing his interest in photography.
Stefan Bursche’s legacy, comprising over eight hundred negatives (including glass and celluloid), is more than just a family archive – both in its scope and content, as well as its historical and artistic value. 

 We invite you to the opening of the exhibition COLLAGE. DEHUMAN with works by Filip Tofil, which will take place on October 30 (Thursday), 7pm.
Everything has already been done. Deconstruction, fragmentation, multiplication, humiliation, or even abuse, of body. The tradition of collage reaches back to the experiments carried out by the Dadaists, Surrealists, and Pop artists. In spite of that, both the theme and the form continually help to broaden the artistic horizons – not only due to the technical and iconographic possibilities (the latter of which manifest themselves in the endlessness and accessibility of the iconographic collections, such as photo archives and library collections), but most of all thanks to the ubiquity of body in visual culture. The exhibition is open until November 7.  

We invite you to the opening of the exhibition Albom.pl, which takes place on the January 8 (Thursday) at 7pm. The photographs, over fifty of which are presented at the show, have been collected during a 2014 research tour across seven towns: Kleszczele and Gródek in Poland, and Sapotskin, Lunna, Voupa, Vawkavysk, and Kamenets-Litovsk in Belarus. Photographers and historians from both countries took part in it.

Have a look at the recent galleries of authors whose works were digitized in 2014: Wojciech Zamecznik, Zofia Chomętowska, and Tadeusz Sumiński. A total of over eight thousand negatives, positives (including large format prints), and graphic design dummies have been scanned and photographed. 

The digitization is co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.

The Estate. Sculptures from the collection of the von Rose family with films and photographs from the archives of Zofia Chomętowska, 18 March – 17 May 2015, Opening: 15 March 2015 at 6.00 p.m., The Museum of Sculpture in Królikarnia.
In the 20th c., Central and Eastern Europe was so much a terrifying as it was a fascinating melting pot of history, with all its wars, revolutions, property expropriated and privatized, people resettled or having to flee. The constant transformations and market changes shaped and reshaped its social, cultural and economic spheres. A certain social structure was coming to an end, and with it a specific culture. The process was parallel to the actual material destruction of works of art. Cooperation: The Archeology of Photography Foundation.

It is the aim of the archeology of photography to search for witnesses of past events! In the case of photography, the role of that witness is played by the light which was the stimulus for the technological processes of documenting reality and which sculpted the past common existence into the negative! The negative, then, is the trace of “that” light and an authentic witness of bygone events. This observation of the light left on the negative may be the theme of fascinating discoveries leading to the unraveling of the mystery of the sculpture of the negative.  / Jerzy Lewczyński

Reviewing the analogue roots of photography is extremely important in the context of contemporary photographic practices. The exhibition Emulsion emerges from the need of revisiting the issues concerned with the materiality of photography and the related formal explorations. The project comprises works by three acclaimed artists who work in photography, but also engage with other media: Dorota Buczkowska, Nicolas Grospierre, and Robert Kuśmirowski. They will show brand new works, prepared especially for the Foundation's gallery space, which reference the origins of photography and deal with such notions as photosensitivity and conservation of photographic material. Coinciding with the opening night of the exhibition will be launch of the book under the same title. The book will feature archival photographs next to works by artists reflecting on the photographic matter as well as exploiting the potential latent in damaged photographs.

The next edition of Zofia Chomętowska’s show Between the Frames. Photographs from 1925-45 will take place in Olsztyn. Over 80 photographs from Polesie, where Chomętowska was born and spent many years, offer an opportunity to remind ourselves about the history of this multicultural region, inhabited by Poleszuks, Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Jews. The opening of the exhibition will take place on Friday 23rd May, at 5pm.

Rynek MOK Gallery, Stare Miasto St. 24/25, Olsztyn

 

We would like to invite you to the opening of Tadeusz Sumiński’s exhibition which will take place on the 7th May at 6pm. It’s the first exhibition from the series Ambiguous Warsaw. The series, devoted to post-war photography of architecture, aims to expose the Warsaw-related activity of three authors tied to the Foundation: Tadeusz Sumiński, Maria Chrząszczowa, and Wojciech Zamecznik. 
 

We would like to invite you to Śródmieście works!, a picnic organized by non-governmental organizations, which will take place this Saturday, 17th May, at Plac Konstytucji. Between 12-4pm, books published by the Foundation will be available for sale, while at 1pm a cyanotype workshop will take place. 

 

The Archaeology of Photography Foundation invites you to a consultation point organized as part of the New Home project, organized by the Community Cultural Centre ’Węglin’ in Lublin. The Foundation also organizes a meeting about the protection of private archives,  accompanied by opening of Ewa Hulley’s exhibition The Archive at Kiosk ze Sztuką. More information about the project. 

 

 We welcome everyone who would like to find out about how to protect their own collections of photography. Each home archive hides exceptional photographs which are waiting to be discovered. Perhaps some of them are exceptionally valuable historically or artistically? Perhaps some of our ancestors were artists, or maybe the photographs which we accidentally found in an flea markets have a chance of getting to art galleries worldwide?

Consultations, accompanying Vivian Maier’s exhibition, will take place on 22nd May, between 3-7pm at Leica Gallery in Mysia 3. 

One of our permanent and most important activities is cataloguing, digitizing, and describing archives which we look after. This year, we plan to scan 8200 photographs from the archives of Wojciech Zamecznik, Zofia Chomętowska, and Tadeusz Sumiński. The vast majority of them will be meticulously described and uploaded to our online library, while a select part of the photographs will also be made available in the galleries on our website. We invite everyone to make use of our galleries and online library, released under the Creative Commons 3.0 license.

Free copies of the Thinking Books post-workshop publication are available for pick-up at the Foundation’s office. The workshop accompanied the programme of the exhibitions Ambiguous Warsaw: Tadeusz Sumiński, Wojciech Zamecznik, Maria Chrząszczowa. We also welcome you to have a look at the documentation of the workshop.The Thinking Books project – workshop based on the photographs of Warsaw architecture of the 1960s and ‘70s was co-financed by the Capital City of Warsaw. 

Karolina Ziębińska Lewandowska, Between the document and the experiment. Photography in Polish photographic periodicals 1945-1989
Anyone who was engaged or interested in photography in the times of the People’s Republic of Poland is aware of the importance of magazines, next to exhibitions. Titles such as Fotografia or Obscura were analogical to Literatura na Świecie in the field of literature or Teksty in philosophy and linguistics in that they updated their readers with the most exciting currents in Poland and abroad in their respective subject matters. 
The richly illustrated book by Karolina Ziębińska-Lewandowska presents the most interesting examples from the areas of critique and post-war photography. The author discusses the avant-garde wave after the end of WW2, conflicts over the status of socialist realism, analytical photography (‘photomedialism’), the question of abstraction in photography, the impressive growth of photoreportage, and how all of these phenomena were described. This publication fills the gap in the coverage of the Polish photography in the times of the People’s Republic of Poland. 

The Archaeology of Photography Foundation presents the first Polish translation of the book by Clément Chéroux, one of the most interesting contemporary curators and critics of photography. The book, comprising seven essays, tells the story of one of the least investigated and, at the same time, one of the richest areas of photography – applied and non-artistic photography.

Multiple portrait, associated in Poland mostly with the archives of Marcel Duchamp and Witkacy, was one of the most popular photographic games in the early 20th century. Private collections and home archives still hide photographs with multiplied reflections of models. The Russians called it the “American trick,” while the Americans referred to it as multiphotography. It arrived to Poland thanks to Witkacy, who brought the idea from St. Petersburg.

Intense work is pending on the archive of Wojciech Zamecznik. Please visit the gallery where we’ve uploaded his designs for 1966 and 1967 calendars created for Gdańsk Shipyard. Gallery >>>

Work on Wojciech Zamecznik’s archive has been financially supported by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.