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At the end of November 2016 the project of digitization of photo prints from Zofia Chomętowska’s collection and rendering them accessible was closed. 89.41% of its cost was co-financed by The Main Directorate for National Archives. The purpose of the project was to index and render accessible 2800 photos, mostly dated back to 1928-1946, taken in Polesie, Warsaw or other Polish cities. The whole collection has been digitalized and carefully described. Some of the most interesting images include photo-documentation of destroyed Warsaw, pre-war Poland palaces, photos taken in Zakopane in the years 1938-1939.

An “ordinary” death is less and less present in culture. People don’t die in the presence of their families, but in hospitals; a coffin with a dead body is not held at home for three days, but instead the relatives visit the deceased in a chapel. According to the cultural anthropologist Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, “contemporary culture, with its cult of youth, if not immortality, is scared stiff of death […] The world, which doesn’t believe in any truths anymore, which perceives everything as a mask and appearance, defends against this most inevitable of truths in any way it can.”

Light in photography is a vast theme, described in countless publications and articles. Any given photograph or image may be analysed from the perspective of light. Thanks to light, we are able to see, take pictures, but also look at them. The history of photography, closely tied to scientific and technological progress, is specifically permeated with technological struggles related to registration of light. It is a history of attempts to ‘tame’ it, to record an image in the shortest time possible, or to create artificial conditions that will enable photographing despite its lack.

To celebrate the Year of the Avant-garde 2017, Archeology of Photography Foundation is exhibiting a selection of Zbigniew Dłubak’s iconic photographs from 1947-1950 for the very first time. In the exhibition Dłubak’s works are juxtaposed with the contemporary series by Basia Sokołowska titled Equivalents 2017. The exhibition is part of Living Archives, a current series of events organised by the APF, opening up the oeuvre of acclaimed artists to contemporary interpretations.

This exhibition marks the first presentation of works by this author at the Archeology of Photography Foundation gallery, and is also an inauguration of the Foundation’s works on the photographer’s archive. Jan Jastrzębski (1925-2001) worked as a reporter for Kraj and Miesięcznik Polski (The Polish Review / La Revue Polonaise). He photographed Polish province and industry, and was also involved in creating documentations of works of art and landscape photography.

Anna Zagrodzka’s project Collection refers to the system of teaching art history based on using visual material on slides. This method, commonly used before the arrival of digital reproduction, is still applied in many lectures.

The Archive of Zofia Chomętowska’s works is now divided between two collections, the Museum of Warsaw (the photographs of the capital from the interwar period, during the war and post-war materials) and the Archaeology of Photography Foundation (photographs from her native Polesie and her émigré life in Argentina).
In a new publication, prepared jointly by both institutions, the artist’s entire archive has been made available in order to present the unique biography of Chomętowska – a photographer, a courageous, independent and modern woman. The publication presents 597 photos collected in four albums: The Enthusiast (1912–1935), The Professional (1936–1944), Documentalist (1945) and Émigré (1946–1981).

The exhibition Lux is a continuation of the Archeology of Photography Foundation’s series of projects based on collaborations with contemporary artists which aim to inspire theoretical reflections on important issues for the history of photography and research practices. The formal background and past ventures of the artists invited to this project are radically different. This heterogeneity opened an opportunity for a multi-layered examination of a theme which is broad and inspiring in various respects – from metaphysical to technological, but which is also dangerously easy to trivialise.

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.

We warmly invite you to the opening of the exhibition of photographs by Antoni Zdrodowski, a photographer from Białystok. The private view will take place on the 3rd of April (Thursday) at 6.30 pm at the Archaeology of Photography Foundation’s gallery. The exhibition has been curated by Grzegorz Dąbrowski. Feel welcome to take this opportunity to also visit our neighbours – Starter Gallery and Stacja Muranów.

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.