Vintage Photo Festival - "The Power of Women" - still to come Sunday

I was in Bydgoszcz the previous weekend and plan to return there on Saturday or Sunday, October 1 or 2, 2022, because I really enjoyed the festival. I want to see the main exhibitions again, this time in peace and quiet, without the vernissage hustle and bustle, at the Rothera Mills, a sensational exhibition space. Perhaps there will be enough time to get to the other venues where VPF is still going on. If you only have the time and opportunity, be sure to head to the city on the Brda River this weekend. You won't regret it, because in addition to the main exhibitions, opened earlier, you can take part in what will be happening just on Saturday and Sunday.

Ten years of hiatus in the publication of "Quarterly Photography", is a long time. What can I say, I fell out of circulation, I stopped following the so-called photographic life in our country, I dealt with my art and professional affairs during this time. One of the things that escaped me was the appearance in 2015 of a brand new photography festival in our country - Vintage Photo Festival, which was created, so to speak, on the ruins of the now iconic Foton from Bydgoszcz. Katarzyna Gębarowska, the originator and director of the festival, writes:

International Festival of Analog Photography Lovers - Vintage Photo Festival - is a cyclical event born in 2015 out of a passion for traditional photography and a deep conviction that old photographic techniques are experiencing a renaissance today. Despite the great revolution and evolution in digital photography, we can see a return, or even a rebirth, of traditional so-called analog photography. Film cameras are returning to favor, as evidenced by the observations of photographic film manufacturers such as Kodak, which in recent years has reinstated the production of several types of negative films withdrawn from the market. Increasingly younger artists are making so-called analog photography their medium of expression.

The idea of the festival is based on the rich photographic traditions of Bydgoszcz, where, until the 1990s, the country's second largest factory producing photographic materials, FOTON, operated. On the basis of this cultural heritage, we have created a precursor festival dedicated to traditional photography, whose strength is a modern educational and animation platform. The aim of the festival is to promote traditional photography and present current trends in this field. The Vintage Photo Festival is the only opportunity of its kind in Poland, and one of the first in the world, to have access to so many exhibitions, author meetings and photography workshops on old photographic techniques in one place and time.

This year's edition of the VPF, like the Venice Biennale, is held under the motto "The Power of Women," and indeed it was women who dominated the shows and meetings, which does not mean, however, that men were completely absent. The great presenter, for example, was the immortal Tadeusz Rolke, who at the opening ceremony of the festival, while receiving a special award from the organizers, confessed with disarming sincerity: "Thank you for the award, although I don't know what for," with which he amused the very large audience. Mr. Tadeusz's role that evening was not limited to receiving the award and flowers, he was also one of the protagonists of the exhibition Symphony No. 7 by Tamara Pieńko, who reversed the situation and put in front of her camera... a photographer, namely Tadeusz Rolke, one of her masters. She not only put him up, but literally undressed him, which he clearly enjoyed!

The other strong male element was certainly Marcin Sudzinski, who won an honorable mention at the Vintage Grand Prix, an international open competition for analog art design, for his series "Black Light." According to the author, the photograms were created by exposing on old, out-of-date 1986 photographic paper objects found in the apartment of a recently deceased friend. More about the Vintage Grand Prix competition and "Black Light" will be written soon by Adam Mazur, who was a juror of the competition. I will only add that later Marcin Sudzinski, together with Rafal Kucharczuk at the Brain club, presented their musical abilities. Marcin created live music (maybe rather sounds), and Rafal displayed visuals, which were created in such a way that first the photograms from Sudzinski's "Black Light" were scanned, then decomposed in the computer into individual dots, and then these dots were "animated" (subjected to animation) in Adobe After Effects. I stared at this audio-visual whole asking myself - what is it about, but after a few minutes I experienced a daze: this thing is not about anything, it's pure form without content, and my role is simply to stare and listen, thus only feeding the sense of sight and hearing. To stop thinking, imagining anything, to turn off the part of the brain responsible for speculative thinking, the so-called intellect. I immediately felt better.

The other strong element of the first festival evening was Marek Noniewicz, whose all-analog set of "Pencil of light" we presented extensively a few days ago. At the vernissage at the Brain club, the author initially hid under a mask, which he took off to address the audience. - O I remember this place, because I used to pass that way every day - And I lived in this house - could be heard in the audience, as the series shows places well known to Bydgoszcz residents.

The first lady of this year's Vintage Photo Festival was certainly Malgorzata Potocka. At the Rothera Mills she showed an exhibition entitled "We don't need other worlds when we have mirrors." The show is made up of the artist's self-portraits from the 1970s and 1980s, and the selection of works was helped by Marika Kuzmicz, whose extensive and We published a very interesting conversation with Margaret Potocka a few days ago. A day later, in the beautiful, almost cinematic interiors of the Hotel Pod Orłem, there was an author's meeting between the two ladies. Malgorzata Potocka told what photography, for which she always lacked time, was to her for several decades, as time was consumed mainly by film. She recalled with fondness the times when her husband was Jozef Robakowski, the times of open-air trips to Osieki near Koszalin, when she also created a lot herself. At the same time she recalled that she is not only an actress, but also an author of films about art and artists, very specific by the way, and a visual artist in general, including a photographer, which many people do not know or forget.

One of the hits of the VPF is the "Photo with a Bear" exhibition prepared by Aleksandra Karkowska and Barbara Caillot. The two ladies have created the Publishing House Originals, where they publish the results of their art-historical-reporting work. Photographs with a teddy bear have almost everyone, or at least everyone, such as myself, has dreamed of having a photo with a teddy bear since childhood. The most famous, of course, is the teddy bear from Krupówki in Zakopane, but - according to the friendly Warsaw residents, who have already collected more than 1,200 photographs with teddy bears - they have been feeding or foraging in the past, also on seaside beaches in Gdynia, Sopot, Jurata, and even in Bydgoszcz, Warsaw, or Chorzow. Ola and Basia also conducted educational and art workshops and held an author's meeting about their book "Foto with a bear."

The power of women also made itself known during the screening of the documentary "To be a woman in the Himalayas" and during the meeting with director Eliza Kubarska. It turned out that not much has changed since the days of Wanda Rutkiewicz, who paved the way for female Himalayan mountaineering in the 1970s - women are still treated by the male majority as a fifth wheel. In this sense, the efforts of Wanda Rutkiewicz and several other female pioneers of climbing Earth's highest mountains have been in vain. Poignantly her sister was remembered by Ms. Janina Files. Eliza Kubarska reported that she is already finishing work on a documentary film about Wanda Rutkiewicz herself, and someone else is shooting a feature film based on the biography of the greatest Himalayan climber in history. Rutkiewicz also deserves to be fully discovered as a photographer and filmmaker. She left behind a huge photographic and film archive that needs to be organized and described, as well as digitized. More than a dozen photographs of Wanda Rutkiewicz were shown at Rothera Mills.

The last vernissage I attended was "Calling," a posthumous exhibition of the late Lodz-based photographer (photographer and philosopher) Andrzej Różycki, who died in 2021. A major exhibition of his work, a retrospective of sorts and, as it turned out a few months later, summarizing Różycki's achievements, was seen at Fotofestiwal in Lodz last year. Both exhibitions were curated by Karol Jóźwiak. The Bydgoszcz show was much more modest in size than the one in Lodz, but also had a slightly different character. The very title alluded to "invoking the spirit" of the deceased artist, whose presence was simply felt thanks to this procedure.

At the end of the report on some of the exhibitions and events that have taken place and will still take place within the framework of the 8th Vintage Photo Festival until Sunday, October 2, I should write a few words of so-called summary. First of all, I think that in recent years another very good photo festival in our country has been created in Bydgoszcz. Katarzyna Gębarowska, as director and head of the whole thing, had a great idea for the festival: despite the huge technological progress and development of digital imaging tools, let's not forget about tradition, about analog photography; let's show that the potential inherent in it can still beat like a source of the purest photographic water. All the more so that in our country, but also outside it, because VPF has an international character, there is still a large group of artists using analog equipment and technology. So there is something to show. As an outsider visitor, I also liked the excellent organization, which is a credit to the team Kasia built and the favor of the local government that financed the event. I was also impressed by the brief and to the point speeches by the president of Bydgoszcz and the Marshal of the Kuyavian-Pomeranian region. It was clear that both gentlemen felt the event and understood what it was all about. Analog photography today is often combined with documentary, sometimes subjective, which, as you can see from VPF, is simplistic to say the least. Within its framework there is still room for both experimentation and the so-called artistic gesture. Or maybe the division of photography into analog and digital is simply artificial and inadequate to what photographers do today?

A theme in itself is, of course, the amazingly revitalized Rother Mills. It's a must see...

The photographs in this article are by Waldemar Sliwczynski.