I Am from Poland: On Wojtek Wieteska's Photographs

What shame is it that prevents us from owning up to ourselves, this mania for keeping up appearances! For putting on a brave face. A Pole who can admit who he is immediately becomes a European and a person of stature. A Pole who tries to prove himself to foreigners, who is ashamed as though today's—or yesterday's—stagnation were his fault alone, identifies himself with his misery. He who casts off his rags becomes sovereignly naked; he who is ashamed and hides his frayed trouser legs under the chair while covering the holes in his jacket with one hand is a pauper. That eternal shame of ours! That weakness! 

Witold Gombrowicz, Diary 1961–1969

I have been photographing Poland since 1986. These photographs are waiting for their moment. Poland is an important subject for me; I need more time. And one of the reasons I go away is so that I can return with a new perspective.

Wojtek Wieteska in conversation with Agata Passent, ‘Między nami’

1. From, to

Presented at Atlas Sztuki in June 2013, Wojtek Wieteska's exhibition I Am from Poland is a polyphonic whole composed of photographs taken between 1986 and 2013 and arranged in sequences. Wojtek Wieteska (b. 1964), one of the most outstanding contemporary photographers, presents a subjective vision of intense transformations occurring not only in politics, economics and culture, but also in the visual sphere that interests the artist most. The iconic frames for which Wieteska is known intermingle in the exhibition with archival material shown for the first time and a whole series of large-format photographs made especially for the presentation at Atlas Sztuki. Monumental and retrospective at once, Wieteska's exhibition allows us to see in a different light an artist hitherto associated with photographs made between the Wild West and the Far East. 

The exhibition Far West, shown in 1999, resulted from a photographic exploration of the south-western United States, whose myth in the history of photography was created both by American artists of the stature of Ansel Adams and Richard Avedon and by visiting Europeans, the best known among them Robert Frank and Jean Baudrillard. Wieteska's black-and-white photographs take on that tradition and point to the fictional, cinematic image of America. In his early American photographs, the artist intriguingly combines the knowledge of an art historian trained at the Sorbonne in Paris with the skills of a cinematographer trained at the Łódź Film School. In 2000, Wieteska consolidated his position in the photographic world with his Tokyo series, exhibited, among other venues, at the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology in Kraków. Individual images—and the photographic series as a whole—are characterised by formal economy and a tonal play of black and white that ultimately produces an extraordinarily poetic effect reminiscent of a visual haiku. Another important stage in Wieteska's development was the exhibition N.Y.C. #02, presented at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in 2003 and devoted entirely to New York. The colour photographs taken on the streets of the metropolis clearly contrast with the black-and-white Far West series and enter into dialogue with the tradition of American street photography. Masterfully composed frames appear to have been made casually, almost by chance. Wieteska creatively synthesises Henri Cartier-Bresson's photographic philosophy (the decisive moment) with the recording of inconsequential moments typical of American artists such as William Eggleston and Garry Winogrand. In 2010, at Warsaw's Yours Gallery, Wieteska showed a broad selection of colour photographs taken in Tokyo, thereby bringing an important chapter of his work to a close (Flights 91_08). His interest in the United States and Japan should not be regarded as a form of artistic escapism. Wojciech Wieteska has repeatedly expressed an interest in the place where he lives. This was true of the exhibition and book Warsaw Station (2006), devoted to the Polish capital, and the project Wide Circle (2010); it is also how one may read his participation in creating exceptionally resonant social campaigns (including those for the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage—Heroes of Our Freedom—the Warsaw Hospice for Children, and Polish Humanitarian Action in Lithuania), as well as the artist's engagement in current local politics. The photographer's journalistic instinct is evident in series made during the nurses' protest outside the prime minister's offices (Protest, 2007) and during the national mourning following the Smolensk air disaster (National Mourning, 2010). In recent years, Wieteska has worked on an archive of photographs from Poland, less closely tied to current events, which he has been photographing from the second half of the 1980s to the present day. These very photographs make up the exhibition I Am from Poland, opening at Atlas Sztuki. I Am from Poland completes the image of Wieteska as a photographer not only of distant metropolises but also as an equally perceptive observer of the reality surrounding him every day. 

Wieteska's work as a director and cinematographer, as well as his commercial practice in advertising and the press, forms a separate chapter in his biography.

1. Yes, I am from Poland

The declaration in the exhibition's title seems at once self-evident and difficult to accept—brazen, even. Self-evident because Wojtek Wieteska is from Poland and, like more than forty million people scattered around the world, can say as much with confidence. There is nothing strange about it. He could be from Germany, France, Burundi or China. He is from Poland. Yet Polishness is a problem; it demands to be confessed, like a somewhat shameful truth (‘I am from Poland’—interestingly, the English translation loses the mixture of embarrassment and pride embedded in the Polish). There is nothing neutral about being a Polish man or woman, only emotions, and only extremes: love and hatred. Photography sublimates emotions, creates distance from reality, allows us to see and discover it differently and, at times, to understand it better.

Photographs from the end of communism and the beginning of capitalism, photographs from the turn of the millennium, show a country that is ordinary (for the most part) and absurd (at times). Or, to put it differently, photographs from the turn of these eras document a process of ‘normalisation’, ‘Europeanisation’ and ‘Westernisation’. Yet from such a perspective, the Polish People's Republic would be an example of aberration and orientalisation. It is not. Perhaps what is at stake is precisely photographing this state of rupture, of being in between? A state exceptional and abnormal elsewhere, but entirely at home in Poland. 

Wieteska is from here but—as he himself says—he keeps leaving in order to see better. The perspective he adopts resembles that of an ethnographer on a field mission, or simply a visitor from another planet. Wieteska observes, synthesises and allegorises. He sees anew, dazzlingly and freshly. He tells no mawkish tales. But neither does he judge. It is not that some are bad and others good, that there are post-communists and former oppositionists; only that black-and-white photography gradually becomes colour. Just like reality. Which is better? Colour and banal excess? Or scarcity and a noble tonal range leading from black to white (in Polish terms: from red to white)?

Wieteska is not interested in day-to-day politics. There is no Round Table, accession to NATO or the European Union here, although the chronology proposed by the artist takes these dates into account. What can be seen in Wieteska's photographs are the effects of political decisions. Politics is inscribed here in material culture, changing customs, barely perceptible gestures, slogans and labels. Politics is private life; it is life on the street. To a lesser extent, it is the invented and staged recent photographs that form a kind of coda to this polyphonic composition as a whole. 

Wieteska grapples with Polishness, but also with Polish photography. The giants of American and French photography cited in the biographical sketch ought now to be replaced by their Polish counterparts. What distinguishes Wieteska here? To what does he respond critically, and what does he affirm?

Compared with Witold Krassowski, Wieteska seems far more focused on things, not only on the people who densely populate Afterimages from Poland. Krassowski is naturalistic and sometimes scathing. With sweep and literalness, Krassowski tells of politics, the collapse of state-owned farms, successive parliamentary elections and Miss Polonia contests. Wieteska has no interest in the immediacy of a photojournalist working to commission. I Am from Poland is Wieteska's life project, not a series of thematic projects for publication in weekly magazines and perhaps later in a book. What links Wieteska with Krassowski, however, is a fascination with the decisive moment, the intensity of the street and everyday life. One might also add here another master of observation as swift as 1/250 of a second: Bogdan Dziworski. Wieteska himself often invokes Dziworski—as a giant of documentary film, but also of photography, especially work as difficult as photographing children and adolescents. Dziworski sketches genre scenes, dramas and humorous situations, first courtyard romances and sporting contests. Even if Wieteska is not quite so drawn to the separate world of teenagers, his photographs and Dziworski's certainly share an extraordinary density and—to some degree—a universality of message. 

Wojciech Prażmowski is another documentarian important to representations of Poland's political transformation. Juxtaposing Wieteska's photographs with frames from White-Red-Black (1999) clearly reveals the dynamism of I Am from Poland. Wieteska is less ironic than Prażmowski and less critical of post-communist reality; he does not quarrel exclusively with the provinces, and he rejects nostalgia. Finally, Wieteska does not focus solely on things but rather on reality, on the relationships between things and people (Krassowski and Dziworski are interested almost exclusively in people). 

Wieteska should also be set against Rafał Milach, perhaps the most gifted artist of the latest generation of Polish photographers still able to remember the Polish People's Republic. Wieteska is certainly not as quick as Milach to generate photographic stories. Wieteska does not hurry: he selects, encompasses and presents with impressive sweep a visual narrative spanning almost the whole of Milach's life (when Wieteska began photographing Poland, Milach was starting primary school). Wieteska and Milach are certainly linked by a certain freedom and fluidity in moving between analogue and digital, between cameras, techniques and eras. Their approaches to people differ. Milach is at his most interesting when telling the stories of individuals, whereas Wieteska intrigues through a lack of context, a lack of words. We see the frame but know nothing about the person. We are forced to complete the story for ourselves. 

In Wojtek Wieteska's story, spread across almost three decades—as the comparison with Rafał Milach, a generation younger, makes particularly clear—the relationship between technological development and the author's biography, knowledge of the world and ways of seeing it plays an important role. With the Polish People's Republic went black-and-white analogue photography, which had been a necessity born of the poverty of a system lurching towards collapse and the unavailability of colour materials. Democracy means vivid colours, the cheap plastic of capitalism and Kodak, Fuji and Agfa film now available on a mass scale. Yet this characteristic palette, too, is gradually replaced by the peculiar colours of digital photography, ever better, ever more perfect and globally indistinguishable. It is also characteristic that Wieteska's photographs, although arranged in a series and a narrative, do not lose their significance when viewed individually, outside the context of the exhibition or book. 

1. Coda

This is not an ordinary exhibition. At any rate, not for me. I met Wojtek Wieteska in the autumn of 1999. That summer I had seen the exhibition Far West at the Old Gallery beside the headquarters of the Association of Polish Art Photographers. After the summer, as a third-year art-history student still impressed by the photographs deftly arranged in that difficult space defined by brick motifs, steps, arches and astonishing changes of level, I arranged to interview the artist. It was the first interview I conducted for ‘Fototapeta’, the online magazine edited by Marek Grygiel. A first encounter with an artist—an important matter. In the years that followed, I tried to keep in touch with the author of Far West. The photographs from Tokyo intrigued me, those from New York attracted me, while those made closest to home, in Warsaw, repelled me. Wieteska posed a problem for me. I did not invite him to the exhibition New Documentarians (2006), but we met somewhat later while working on what may have been an even more important exhibition for me, The Unrepresented World (2012). For years we talked about the archive of Polish photographs: a mythical archive from which individual, tremendously promising images surfaced from time to time. Wieteska used the archive to create smaller exhibition narratives, sequences of images accompanying interviews or press presentations of his own work. As often happens, once a subject had been raised it returned in conversation and haunted us, but never materialised as an exhibition. It is easy to understand why. More than twenty-five years of intensive work across the watershed between communism and capitalism, spanning the turn of the millennium, meant thousands of images, hundreds of unscanned negatives, myriad memories, human stories and encounters, and finally the inexorable necessity of working through all these personal threads and penetrating the heavily dust-covered material of analogue photography. The invitation to participate in the aforementioned exhibition The Unrepresented World provided the impetus to begin. Ultimately, my aim as curator was precisely to make such materials accessible to a wider public. Wieteska's Poland was for me an ‘unrepresented world’ par excellence. An outstanding photographer known for photographs of New York and Tokyo surely had something to show on the Polish subject. At the same time, I was interested in a story far more consequential than the localities and peripheral byways Wojtek Wieteska had revealed in Warsaw Station. The dozen or so photographs selected, enlarged, printed and framed for the exhibition at Ujazdowski Castle hit the mark, but left one wanting more. It was then that we first discussed a solo exhibition, the first show we would be able to prepare together. On the eve of the opening, owning up to myself, my country and photography, I therefore echo the artist: ‘yes, I too am from Poland’. 

Dr Adam Mazur (b. 1977), critic, art historian and scholar of American studies, graduate of the Graduate School for Social Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, lecturer at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. From 2002 to 2013 he was a curator at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art (including the exhibitions New Documentarians; Red-Eye Effect: Polish Photography in the 21st Century; Schism: Polish Art of the 1990s). Author of the books Kocham fotografię (I Love Photography, 2009), Historie fotografii w Polsce 1839–2009 (Histories of Photography in Poland 1839–2009, 2010) and Decydujący moment (The Decisive Moment, 2012). From 2004 to 2011 editor-in-chief of the magazine ‘Obieg’. Editor-in-chief of ‘Szum’ since 2013.