Stanisław Niedźwiecki – Poland

Stanisław Niedźwiecki was born on May 23, 1890, in Shaykuny, a place on the border of present-day Belarus and Lithuania, which was then part of the Russian Empire. In the years before World War I, he studied anthropology and ethnography at the University of St. Petersburg, while after the Communist Revolution of 1917 he found himself in Transcaucasia. During this time, he also began to dabble in photography, which eventually became his profession when he stayed in Persia from around 1921 to 1935 and found employment there as a photographer for English and American archaeological expeditions. At that time he maintained correspondence contact with Polish photographic magazines (Miesięcznik Fotograficzny, Fotograf Polski), to which he sent photographs and texts on the technique and aesthetics of photography. At the beginning of 1936, he returned to his hometown, then already within the borders of independent Poland, taking photographs along the way in the Middle East, Greece and Turkey. Back home, he joined the “native photography” movement, which was initiated by Jan Bulhak, who lived in Vilnius. The consequences of World War II made Jelenia Gora his next place of residence from 1945. For 10 years there, he ran a studio of sightseeing and art photography at the Youth House of Culture, and independently traveled with his camera, often by bicycle, both in the surrounding Sudetenland and throughout Poland until the end of his life. He was a popular figure in the Jelenia Góra community, and enjoyed high prestige in the circles of the Polish amateur photography movement and PTTK. He had 25 individual exhibitions of sightseeing photography in the post-war period. The last of these: “Exoticism and Romanticism in Photography,” including photographs from Persia and Poland, was held in 1973. Stanislaw Niedzwiecki died in Jelenia Gora three years later.
Marcin Andrzejewski, who is credited with organizing an exhibition of Stanislaw Niedzwiecki’s photographs taken in Persia before World War II at the Karkonosze Museum in Jelenia Gora in 2005, has now decided to recall also his post-war photographs from Poland. The copies he made from Niedzwiecki’s original negatives show mainly architecture and landscapes characteristic of various regions of the country, in their state of preservation up to the 1960s. These photographs differ in many respects from those taken by Niedzviecki earlier in Persia, but common features can also be identified. The works related to Persia seem to be a more coherent set, due to the author’s professional commitments, the exotic scenery and nature of the sights there, as well as by the way the images were captured on now archaic media. Polish landscapes, on the other hand, selected from that part of Stanislaw Niedzwiedzki’s post-war archive at Marcin Andrzejewski’s disposal, seem rather like loose notes from his tourist escapades. And although the formula of the messages in these photographs is obvious, their recipients can find different meanings there.
They reveal how much Stanislaw Niedzviecki’s work was influenced at the time by the program of “native photography,” propagated since the 1930s in Poland by Jan Bulhak, who most fully articulated and illustrated it in his book “Native Photography,” published in 1951. Bulhak advocated combining the documentary function of photography with the aesthetic perfection of the individual development of its final image. For him, the ideal solution was to show the works of man, especially outstanding architecture, coexisting with equally vividly depicted manifestations of nature’s power. Bulgak saw the essence of feeling homeland in consciously experiencing the transcendental qualities of beauty perceived in the forms of nature and works of art, which is why his photographs, taken in 1945-1950 in the so-called Recovered Territories, among other places, have the qualities of artistic autonomy, in contrast to the political propaganda dominating the subject at the time. Stanislaw Niedzwiecki followed a similar path, although this is evidenced here only by his negatives and not by the final developed author’s prints.
His vision of the homeland in the changed borders after the war, is not as systematic and representative as Jan Bulhak cared for, but the great variety of motifs in the presented collection also has its value. Most often, the main subject of these photographs is historic architecture of different eras: churches, castles, backstreets in old buildings, fragments of old fortifications, or details of sculptural decoration of buildings. These objects are the dominant feature in the paintings, which Niedźwiecki captures in frames formed by vegetation, the sky with accents of clouds, and a palette of lighting effects. He found many subjects for his photographs in Jelenia Gora and its surroundings, but besides that he documented the recognizable sights of Warsaw, Krakow, Toruń, Gdansk, Wroclaw, Czestochowa and smaller cities. Some of the views are difficult to place, if only a fragment of a building, some romantic corner, or a local landscape is shown. Although the author of the photographs usually pays homage to impressive architecture, he also does not omit more modest subjects, having a peculiar mood and being a praise of the beauty of everyday life. As a rule, there are few references to current political and social events in these photographs. Among the exceptions is a fragment of a wall with the inscription “three times yes,” a vestige of the campaign before the referendum announced after the war by the communists. People, if they appear in these photographs, are only small silhouettes fulfilling some customary daily ritual.
In the first decades after the war, a lot of destruction caused by the war was still visible, which in Stanislaw Niedzviecki’s photographs appear on the margins of his main interest in monuments. Traces of destruction are also visible on historical monuments in many cases, but this does not have such tragic overtones. For the author of the photos, such blemishes seem to be an indispensable attribute of archaism, which in fact emphasizes their importance, testifies to their ability to survive and mobilize renewal. It seems that this kind of reflection applies to everything Stanislaw Niedzwiecki directed the lens of his camera at. As he did in Persia, with the eye of an archaeologist he perceived in Poland evidence of the appearance and passing of different eras, traces of the aspirations of different communities and evidence of different levels of life. In his photographs, the persistence of history is attested to by objects of worship, ruins of fortresses, showy mansions, as well as modest homes or even thatched cottages, and with all this, life-giving nature partially shaped by man. Modernity, expressed through technological momentum, is hardly present in this author’s vision, except for a few scenes from the port of Gdynia. Only rarely do old cars appear there, and slightly more often do we spot cyclists. This is all the more striking given that the post-war quarter century was full of triumphant technological utopias based on advances in science, and while the communist regime that took hold in Poland was able to meet only the simplest of social needs, it also spread visions of prosperity once its reforms were realized. However, although Stanislaw Niedzwiecki looks benevolently at his contemporaneity, his sensitivity, imbued with an awareness of the centuries-old perspective of history, leads him to make choices justified primarily by his life experience.
Adam Sobota