Landscapes

One Masurian landscape photograph is signed ‘Stefan’ on the reverse, a pseudonym Chrząszczowa often used. Picturesque views: fishing nets hung out to dry, lakes glimmering in the sun, fields and forests, this may be a collection of tests and potential entries for a photo competition.

Chrząszczowa marked the photographs of twisted roots and gnarled branches as ‘bizarre plane trees’. The images are probably from a private trip to Lower Silesia in 1971, though Chrząszczowa had been documenting the region of the so called Regained Territories – Wrocław, Jelenia Góra, Zielona Góra, Kłodzko – since the late 1940s.

The earliest Chrząszczowa could have taken the photographs of ice floes floating down the Vistula was in the winter of 1946. The Most Poniatowskiego bridge visible in two of the images had been rebuilt and put into use in July 1946.

In 1947, as it was rebuilding itself from the destruction of war, Poland was hit by a massive thaw flood. Chrząszczowa conveyed a rather subdued image of the natural disaster, unlike Jerzy Bossak’s award-winning film The Flood, which showed the tragedy in all its ghastly splendour. Chrząszczowa documented the flood’s late stage: the last thaws and the overflowing Jeziorka River near the Old Paper Mill. She captured an image of the neo-Gothic Church of the Holy Virgin Mary at Piłsudskiego Street 54, a design of Józef Pius Dziekoński and Zdzisław Mączeński, reflected in the flood waters. Chrząszczowa lived in Konstancin until the 1960s, when she moved to Polna Street in Warsaw.

Warsaw is a recurrent theme in the “Landscapes” series. The earliest photographs, taken on 6x9 cm film, date back to the 1950-53 period, depicting views from apartments in the districts of Praga and Wola, or shots of yards and streets. The best known set was taken ca. 1962 on 6x6 cm film and focuses on the upper Mokotow district where the artist had been living since 1957.

The first works of the series were made by Dlubak during the trips on which he carried out photographic commissions, e.g. documenting the agricultural and farming production at State Agricultural Farms (PGR). Later works, usually in 6x6cm format, usually capture the environs of Warsaw.

In 1950 Zbigniew Dlubak began developing his “Landscapes” series which marked the end of the radical formal experiments that characterized his practice in the late 1940s. After the first tests with outdoor photography, which betrayed his fascination with mood and chiaroscuro qualities, the artist found his own way of breaking with the picturesque tendencies that dominated Polish landscape photography at the time. Up until 1962, when the series was concluded, Dlubak was taking subdued, unattractive, shots of Warsaw and its surroundings, where monotony, a lack of contrast, and banality in regard to the motif photographed, became a formal principle.

In the early 1950s, probably between 1950 and 1953, Zbigniew Dlubak was living with Irena Jarosinska in Praga district. At that period the artist retreated from social life. He made a living from commissions and simultaneously carried out a series of photographs of urban and suburban landscapes. This collection of views from his apartment /studio, situated near St. Florian church, was taken at this time.