The book dedicated to the work of Zbigniew Tomaszczuk was already published by the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in 2018, but the book reached me only now, a few days ago, so I can write a few words of my complement only four years after the publication of the study.
The publication has been prepared with great care and provides a comprehensive look at Professor Tomaszczuk's artistic achievements. Very insightful articles written by the leading authors scientifically engaged in the history of Polish photography - let us remind you that the hero of the monograph himself has also been engaged in this field for several decades - show various aspects of Zbyszek's work, so there is not the slightest need here to repeat information about what Tomaszczuk has done in photography, I refer you to the book.
For the sake of order, I will only mention the authors and chapter titles:
Andrew P. Bator, Full range of vision
Marianna Michalowska, (Behind)the vision - photography as expression
Zbigniew Tomaszczuk, My life with photography and vice versa
Elżbieta Łubowicz, Images found on the street
Piotr Wolynski, Camera - time - parallax on the example of Zbigniew Tomaszczuk's photographic realizations.
All texts except the Polish version have been translated into English, and photographs are shown in three blocks:
PHOTOGRAPHY as document and social commentary
PHOTOGRAPHY as analyzing meanings
PHOTOGRAPHY as documenting traces.
The whole is complemented by a biography and a list of Zbigniew Tomaszczuk's exhibitions. The book can be purchased at the online store of the Warsaw Academy -. HERE, costs PLN 46.20.
Meeting Zbyszek in the 1990s is among those events in my life that are most often described as significant, which, however, does not fully reflect the importance of the event. It was something much more important and bigger than I had originally thought. We met at the pf gallery in Poznan, which was still run by its founder at the time - Janusz Nowacki, the other person who was extremely important to me as a photographer. I was already familiar with Zbyszek's "Image Hunters," which at the time was the only textbook on the history of modern photography in our country, so not knowing the author personally, I assumed that he was a guy who was haughty and full of distance from ordinary people. And that's when, during the meeting at Janusz's, when it turned out that Zbyszek is a normal and very contactable person, I thought: gee, photographers are an extremely nice, creative group of people, I need to get to know them better.
Less than two years later, when I fulfilled my big dream of a photography magazine and founded "Quarterly Photography," Zbyszek became editor-in-chief. As they say "there was no other option". Zbigniew Tomaszczuk met all the criteria: he was a great photographer, a didactician of photography, who, in addition, writes and publishes a lot about photography. Besides, he is a link between the old "Fotografia", where he published his articles, that is, in the magazine to whose program line in our "Quarterly" we wanted to refer. Tomaszczuk was known to everyone and he knew everyone. Already in 2000 he was a well-known and respected figure, which already at the start gave "KF "a certain prestige, or at least interest.
For the most difficult first three years, when neither Eryk Zjeżdżalka nor I, later chiefs, were simply not competent enough yet, Zbigniew Tomaszczuk "pulled" everything himself. I was in Września, Eryk was in Poznań at the pf-, and Zbyszek was in Warsaw. The editor-in-chief would complete all the materials for the issue at his home, and then come to Września with CDs or original illustrations for scanning, mock-ups and texts, probably still some on floppy disks, and the rest was handled by me. Erik helped me. Zbyszek also allowed us to add our own articles or authors we would find ourselves. After a week or two, he would come to proofread, after which the issue would go to print at my printing house in Września. It was a very intensive time for me, mainly learning, getting to know the best photography that was being produced in our country, as well as abroad. Zbyszek was one of my photography teachers during this time. His choices of what is good, so worth showing in the Quarterly, opened my head to different concepts of photography, showed me that there is no one right, best one. And this has stayed with me to this day: there is no mainstream, there is no avant-garde, everything photographers do is equally "legitimate" to exist, even what we may not yet understand. It once happened that we were looking together at the works that were hanging in the Arsenal in Poznan during some Biennale of Photography. I didn't understand a set completely, so I asked Zbyszek what it was all about, and he replied: - Picasso at the beginning no one understood either, so he didn't accept.
This gave me food for thought: yes, Zbyszek was right, you have to be open to different types of art, you have to try to understand them, you have to do the sometimes difficult work of thinking, you must not close yourself off, pigeonhole yourself. The same, by the way, is true of his own work - these are not pretty pictures, which beyond this first "epidermal" layer have nothing more to convey. His photography, are "semantically two-layered signs", which, in addition to purely artistic, visual values, also contain a communicative layer, that is, the so-called "message", which needs to be reproduced, because it cannot be seen in ordinary, superficial, colloquial, unreflective viewing.
This was the most important lesson I took from Zbyszek at the time and which we, editing "KF" later and now, apply: we do not present only one type of photography, we are open to all manifestations of photographic creativity - there is no better or worse photography, there are only better or worse realizations within their concepts. Just as in music, blues is not better or worse than, for example, opera or pop, there are only better or worse bluesmen or jazzmen. And this approach works for us.
Reading and looking at the photographs included in the monograph "Scope of Seeing," I was reminded of an event related to one of Zbigniew Tomaszczuk's exhibitions, namely the exhibition "Za(kres) widzenia" in November 1998, which I hung with Eric Zjeżdżalka in the Września Regional Museum named after the Children of Września. It was a lot of fun, because many of Zbyszek's photographs grew out of his great sense of humor, and the wine that accompanied us at this physical work was also not insignificant. It was fun... I think the public premiere of these photos after so many years makes sense, especially since a few days ago was another anniversary of Erik's death.
