The exhibition will last until June 30, 2024. Opening hours are Mondays and Tuesdays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Free admission.
The Archeology of Photography Foundation asks how we look at works of art through the lens of a camera.
Virtual museum collections and digital archives are growing at a dizzying pace. Open access to images of artwork, however, means that reproductions, taken with cameras, are being made available. And the gesture of documenting is not transparent, after all. Exhibition Where is the original? recalls the photographs of Antoni Zdebiak, Jan Fleischmann and Danuta Rago, who photographed paintings, sculptures or art installations in a creative and non-obvious way. The Warsaw-based Archeology of Photography Foundation invites the public to the exhibition starting May 17.
Question Where is the original? posed at a new exhibition at the Archeology of Photography Foundation addresses the issue of reproducing works of art in photographs. The work of male and female photographers documenting works of art is usually not given much credit, as it is generally regarded as a craft, and the photographs themselves as a type of record whose subject matter is most important.
Selected works of three exceptional figures of Polish photography will be presented: Antoni Zdebiak (1951-1991), Jan Fleischmann (1940-2019) and Danuta Rago (1934-2000). Zdebiak, a photographer-performer, redefined photographic reproduction in his experimental pictures. Fleischmann dealt with reproduction professionally, and his photos show versatility, workshop proficiency and a creative approach to a seemingly only secondary occupation. Rago documented the restoration work on the Racławice Panorama between 1981 and 1985 and managed to show the process of reproducing this monumental work of art as a remarkable spectacle.
Exhibition Where is the original? Art in photography is also a reflection on the main branch of FAF's activities, namely the digitization of the archives of Polish women photographers.
- In the exhibition we ask questions about the status of the photographic copy of the work," says the curator, Mikolaj Chmielinski. - We wonder what qualities of the object it turns out to be insensitive to and where the line between copy and creation begins, he adds.
Reproducing performer
Antoni Zdebiak He was involved in reportage, advertising, theatrical and fashion photography, and also created photos for album covers of leading Polish bands of the 1980s, as diverse as Republika, Majka Jeżowska, Budka Suflera and Siekiera. He was an actor and performer - he made the object of his art primarily himself. He duplicated, deformed and colored the image of his body - capturing it from an infinite number of angles and in many positions.
Zdebiak took a series of photographs of the Warsaw Nike monument in 1975 for a special issue of the literary magazine "New Expression." The monochromatic color photographs emphasize the expressiveness of the monument through framing and an unusual shot from below - looking Nike straight in the face.
Elective Reproducer
Jan Fleischmann specialized in applied photography - he created book covers, posters and advertising sessions. He was commissioned by publishing houses, magazines or museums to make reproductions of paintings, sculpture, architecture, graphics, utilitarian objects or architectural models. His archive contains many proofs and notes, which shows how professionally he approached his craft.
Fleischmann photographed, among others, the light, air-movement installations of Antoni Zydroń, or the sculptures of Olgierd Truszynski, where he abandoned the neutral background in favor of the artist's cluttered studio. Also, the product photos of lamps are consciously stylized as futuristic objects with a purpose that is unclear at first glance. Photographs of his thesis - a model of a photographic studio and a mock-up of the Revolutionary Acts monument designed by Oskar Hansen and Jan Kucz - are exceptional. Fleischmann impressively played with scale and framing, disrupting the relationship between fiction and reality.
Photojournalist on reproduction
Danuta Rago, the heroine of a recent exhibition by the Archeology of Photography Foundation Illusion factoryń, contributed to Polish photojournalism and press photography for more than four decades of activity. In 1983, for a special issue of "Perspectives," she took a series of photographs depicting reconstruction work Panorama of Raclawice, a monumental work by Wojciech Kossak and Jan Styka. For almost four years, a team of several dozen restorers struggled with fourteen fragments of a canvas 15 meters high and 120 meters long in total. Rago's photo essay was also a challenge - how to fit the enormous size of the work itself and the previously unprecedented scale of the restoration work into the camera frame? Rago succeeded in capturing the size of the undertaking - literally, through photographs of the restorers and conservators raised above the ground on construction platforms and juxtaposed with the size of the painted warriors, as well as metaphorically through photographs of the rotunda building, a mock-up of the work, and portraits of the many restorers and reconstructionists involved. Reconstruction recreated in photography - that's what Danuta Rago's photo essay is.
May 18, on the Night of the Museums, there will be a curatorial tour and workshop in the digitizing studio with translation into Polish sign language. From 18:00 it will be possible to take part in the workshop (two rounds, number of places limited, registration: fundacja@faf.org.pl) and in an open curatorial tour.
June 27 The exhibition will culminate in a celebration of the sixteenth Birthday of the Archeology of Photography Foundation.
More about the accompanying program: Facebook of the Archeology of Photography Foundation
Archeology of Photography Foundation is engaged in the development and preservation of the archives of Polish male and female photographers. It was established in 2008 and currently takes care of the archives of more than a dozen male and female artists, which undergo comprehensive work: organizing, digitizing and making them available online. More than 95,000 records are available free of charge online at the Virtual Museum of Photography. FAF runs a gallery, research projects, organizes exhibitions, workshops and lectures, and publishes albums and books on the theory and history of photography.