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Eustachy Kossakowski, Marek Grygiel
Source : website : www.fototapeta.art.pl
« Clear vision - talking to Eustachy Kossakowski ».
In 2000, Eustachy Kossakowski began to restore an old house at Brok, a village close to the river Bug. The text below is an abridged version of an interview which took place during a long walk through the riverbank meadows, on a hot August afternoon.
Eustachy Kossakowski was talking to Marek Grygiel.
Marek Grygiel - Why are we meeting here, at Brok, ninety kilometres from Warsaw?
Eustachy Kossakowski - I managed to put a little money together, from some reserves which I still had, in order to create a sort of back-up home. I don’t necessarily plan to move in there straight away, but the intention is to create a small haven, which will give us a little security if something should happen, the comfort of knowing that if things go pear-shaped, we wouldn’t have to camp on a tube platform, but would be able to come here, for example. Ending up here would be like ending up on a tube platform, but in more comfort. I mean psychological comfort, because otherwise I would prefer to be in Paris rather than here.
M. G. - Why Paris?
E. K. - For many reasons. Obviously not only professional ones, but above all because of the cultural context of Paris: the contacts with culture, literature, art, and with exhibitions and with people you won’t find here, because they have all been butchered. The communists knew exactly what they were doing. They slaughtered the intelligentsia and the middle class. Many people left the country and a lot of riff-raff stayed behind. I don’t feel comfortable with the great unwashed in Warsaw, but in Cracow I feel a little better.
M. G. - Could we start at the beginning, because it’s your photography that interests us. Have you known right from the start that you wanted to be a photographer or has this knowledge crept up on you? How did it happen? You do think of yourself as a photographer, don’t you?
E. K. - Absolutely, I would say I am a photographer par excellence, but I don’t want it to sound pompous. I do think I have a kind of clarity of vision and a gift of visual perception, which are different from the average way of seeing things. I feel I see things more clearly, or differently maybe. Perhaps this came about through so many years of taking photographs. I don’t think it’s necessarily something I was born with. To answer the questions about how I became a photographer: I began to take pictures in my early childhood. My father was a professor of surgery and photography was a serious hobby for him. We had an enlarger and developing trays in the bathroom, and we made prints, 24 by 30 cm, 18 by 24 cm and smaller…
M. G. - Where did all this happen?
E. K. - At home, in Warsaw, when the war was still going on, I was fifteen or sixteen and I spent hours in the darkroom, making prints.
M. G. - What sort of things were you photographing then?
E. K. - I took pictures of all sorts of things… However, at that stage my attitude was affected strongly by the events of the time. After the Warsaw Uprising, when masses of cats and dogs mad from hunger were running through the ruins of Warsaw, I really thought that Warsaw had gone for ever and that there was nothing left to photograph there. I begged my father to give me two złoty for a ticket to Leśna Podkowa, and I went there to take pictures of the woods, the birch trees and the picteresque cottages. That was the state of my mind then, at eighteen years of age.
M. G. - Was it purely for your own pleasure?
E. K. - It was… If I had had a real photographic gene in me, I would have been photographing nothing but Warsaw as it was then. However, being eighteen in 1944 and bring eighteen now are worlds apart. Today a child of eight knows more than I knew at eighteen. Throughout the entire war I never went to the theatre or cinema. I didn’t see one exhibition. I wore wooden clogs and I did hard physical work - that was my entire life, apart from going to school.
M. G. - Did you already have a camera of your own in those days?
E. K. - Yes I did, a Voigtlander, a sort of square box with a viewfinder at the top.
M. G. - Was it difficult to get equipment like that then?
E. K. - No, everything was available, the paper, Mimosa or others, Agfa… (Mimosa was a high quality photographic paper made at the time - ed.). You could buy anything, indeed perhaps there were even more sorts of paper in those days than there are now: Mimosa, granulated paper, something like canvas, chamois, glossy and matt paper, everything was there, and better quality than Polish Foton and so on.
M. G. - Did you take any photographs of the city?
E. K. - I did take some, in 1944, but then I had an accident. My legs were crushed. I spent a few years in hospital. Later on I studied architecture.
M. G. - What kind of accident was it? Was it a road accident, a car?
E. K. - No, it was the result of my underground activities in 1944.
M. G. - Were you in Warsaw during the Uprising?
E. K. - I was, but not in the centre. I was at Szembek Square, in Zamieniecka Street, and later in the Kampinos Forest.
M. G.. - Was it with the Grey Battalions? (The Grey Battalions was the name given to Polish underground scout groups fighting the Nazis during the war - trans.)
E. K. - No, it was part of the Home Army (The Home Army was a major resistance force fighting the Nazis in Poland during the war - trans.)…
M. G. - And what happened later?
E. K. - …I fell under a train, so I was put in hospital. Then the communists arrived. I stayed in hospital and a year and a half later I took an exam to study architecture. During my studies and after I finished them I worked on the restoration of our architectural heritage, because I didn’t want to be involved in projects such as the construction of MDM, etc. (MDM was a communist showcase quarter in the centre of Warsaw, built in heavy, Soviet-influenced style - trans.). I also had close contacts with the Academy of Art, where I used to spend a lot of time, almost as if I was also a student there.
After seven years working at the heritage conservation centre at the Blank Palace I began to get bored. All those design studios, the regulated working hours… I had a few photographer friends, Marian Sokołowski among them, and he said to me ‘Listen, you can take pictures, so you don’t have to work as an architect, just become a professional photographer.’ And he got me my first photographic assignment, at some little magazine - I cannot remember its name now. I had to travel to the Swiętokrzyski Mountains, take a train at three o’clock in the morning, then walk fifteen kilometres from the station, to a clinic deep in the countryside… My first photographic commission. That was the start of my new life as a photographer. Every week for a good few years I took pictures of girls for the cover of Zwierciadło (The Looking Glass).
In those days I lived in Marszałkowska Street, in the same building as the editorial offices of Stolica (The Capital) were. Tadzio (Rolke) worked there, and I lived two floors above. That was the time I met him, I was keen to maintain contact, and thanks to him I then got a job at Stolica, where I shared a darkroom with Tadzio and Bartoszewski for several years. Then I joined Zwierciadło. When Ty i ja (You and I) appeared, Cieślewicz and so on, Tadzio and I began to work for them… One of my assignments for Stolica caught the eye of Piórkowski, the Editor-in-Chief of Polska. He asked me to drop in at his office, told me that he liked my style of work and commissioned something else from me. After looking at what I had produced, he offered me a permanent job. And so I began to work for Polska, with Holzman, Jarosińska, Tadzio and Barącz. I stayed there for something like twelve years… until I left Poland in 1970.
M. G. - Did you all leave together?
E. K. - All at the same time.
M. G. - Had you come to the same conclusions? Things had gone flat?
E. K. - Not quite. Alongside everything else, I was closely connected with the Foksal Gallery and with Kantor’s theatre. I photographed his productions over a number of years, and also Grotowski’s theatrical performances. Recently there was a huge exhibition of Kantor’s happenings in Cracow, where a hundred of my photographs were exhibited. As it turned out, I was the only person who had taken photographs of Kantor’s spectacles. At the time he wasn’t well-known at all, nobody had an inkling that one day he would become world-famous…
M. G.- And you were involved with all this…
E. K. - Not just involved, I was right in the middle of it all. I photographed all the productions. And now I get a call from Mr Suchan at Bunkier Sztuki (The Art Bunker) in Cracow, asking me whether I can lend them the negatives… I said I’d be very happy to do so but how much would they pay me? I sent them a hundred negatives by express mail. They blew them up to eight by four metres - it wasn’t my exhibition, although it consisted of my photographs, since nobody, with a few small exceptions, had ever photographed those events… If my photographs hadn’t existed, the only record of Kantor’s productions we’d have now would be the descriptions of them by art historians…
M. G. - Kantor wasn’t the easiest of men to work with, was he?
E. K. - That’s true, we always got on badly, towards the end of his life I cut off all contact with him, and to this day I don’t speak to his widow, Marysia…
I went to the promotion of a book on the Foksal Gallery at the Ujazdowski Castle in May this year, she was there and when I came in she said ‘Eustachy, you didn’t say ‘‘Hello’’ to me’, and I replied ‘I didn’t say ‘‘Hello’’, because I didn’t want to say ‘‘Hello’’’.
M. G. - No beating about the bush there, then…
E. K. - I have no desire to say either ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’ to her.
M. G. - What else did you photograph in Poland, apart from Kantor’s productions?
E. K. - We did reportage. Piórkowski at Polska was a highly intelligent Editor-in-Chief. Despite of this, the magazine was still a propaganda tool for the regime. It showed only one side of the coin, the best aspects of Poland. The other, darker side was never acknowledged. All that was done rather cleverly.
M. G. - Have you ever managed to sneak something past the authorities, in order to reveal the less palatable side of Poland?
E. K. - Not really. Nevertheless our assignments were interesting. For example, during the war the Germans were trying out their V1 rockets near Gdańsk, and the shells ended up somewhere in Zamojszczyzna (Eastern Poland - trans.). So we went there and looked around the countryside, where we would find something like a cattle watering trough made from a V1 rocket, or half a barn built from V2 rockets. Or we followed the tracts left by the Arian Sect in Kielecczyzna (South- eastern Poland - trans.)…
Such assignments were part of the regime’s propaganda effort aimed at the West, not for internal consumption in Poland, so the production levels were high, everything was quite glossy and high class. Still, although we were there as tools of the regime, we had the opportunity to take photographs.
However, on two occasions I refused an assignment.
M. G. - What was the subject?
E. K. - The first one was the unveiling of the statue of Pope John XXIII in Wrocław. I refused to do it. I thought Piórkowski would sack me, but he didn’t.
M. G. - Why did you refuse?
E. K. - Because I considered Piasecki (Bolesław Piasecki was in charge of PAX, an organisation set up after the war, which was ostensibly Catholic, but in fact intended to undermine the Catholic Church in Poland - trans.) to be a vile creature…
M. G. - In the end he did not go to the unveiling…
E. K. - But the PAX organisation was there, all those people connected with it…
The second assignment was a different matter. Because I happen to be a member of a so-called aristocratic, Polish family, the editor was aware that I knew other aristocratic families, such as the Radziwills, the Czetwertynskis, and so on, and that I had kept contacts with them, although they weren’t close contacts, since I do not like that class of people very much. He wanted me to concoct something on the Polish aristocracy in People’s Poland. For instance, Radziwill is studying medicine, Czetwertynski is emptying the bedpans at the Christ-Child Hospital, Zamoyski is a specialist on atomic energy, etc. Since I had family connections with those people, with the regime as it was at that time, the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth, so I refused to work on that assignment as well.
M. G. - Are there any of your photographs of that period that you value more than others?
E. K. - Certainly: when the rabbis from all over the world came to Treblinka. Bartoszewski telephoned me to let me know that the visit was going to take place. It was not an official visit, the rabbis travelled on two coaches, from the prosecutor in Eichmann’s trial to the chief rabbis of Tel Aviv, New York, Paris… They all walked through the fields, finding Jewish bones, because there was a trench dug out there in preparation for putting up a monument. They carried bone fragments on Jewish newspapers, there was incense, they sang psalms with their heads covered, and I photographed it all. The report was published in Polska and the Martyrdom Museum in Tel Aviv wanted to buy it from me, but Piórkowski forbad me to sell it, so I never sold those pictures. I still have the negatives somewhere, I’m not quite sure where they are… Nowadays I sell a fair amount of Jewish-themed stories to musée [d’art et d’histoire] du Judaïsme in Paris. I would like to find out where the interesting Jewish cemeteries in Poland are, so I can still manage to photograph them, as I keep getting well-paid commissions for subjects like that.
M. G. - Do you remember any other work?
E. K. - I remember a lot of work that appeared in Polska. There was a wedding at Nysa: a local woman (i.e. a woman of German origin - trans.) was marrying a Polish farmer, at the time there was an issue of people like that uniting with their motherland. I got drank at Nysa, on the way back the militia took my driving licence away…
There was also a Japanese guy, who walked all the way from Hiroshima to Auschwitz, there were two metres of snow and minus thirty six degrees, and he held Buddhist prayers, standing barefoot for eight hours, in his thin orange monk’s robe… there were a lot of those sort of reports… it may be worth looking through old issues of Polska… I’d like to see them again myself…
M. G. - The magazine appeared in a few languages.
E. K. - There were six different editions, then they added a version for the East, which was different from the ones aimed at the West.
M. G. - There were all those magazines, Polska and Ty i ja, and you said: ‘We are leaving, we don’t want to stay here any longer…’?
E. K. - It wasn’t a specific idea that I didn’t want to be here any longer. I was in a really privileged position. I had close contacts with the group around the Foksal Gallery, which for me was a platform for being and non-being, existence and non-existence, and offered me a safe place where I could function in Poland, those days being what they were. On the one hand there was the rejected reality, on the other the possibility of a different kind of existence. The decision to leave came when there was a split in the group around the Foksal Gallery, when Anka Ptaszkowska, Stażewski, Krasiński and others left the Gallery, when a serious conflict with Kantor began. Kantor simply took over the Gallery and a lot of people didn’t agree, most people didn’t. In the circumstances, we decided to leave, because we realised that we no longer had any basis for functioning.
M. G. - However, there was still the Gallery’s boss, Wiesław Borowski, there was Mr Tchorek…
E. K. - Tchorek also left, Ptaszkowska left with me and Krasiński, Stażewski quit the Gallery, but Wiesław continues to be in charge of the Gallery to this day, he took Kantor’s side in the conflict, which took place here, in Warsaw. It’s all well documented, because a book was published, called Tadeusz Kantor - from the Archives of the Foksal Gallery. Practically 90% of the photographs in the book were mine. As far as the texts went, not everything was included, nevertheless we do now have the first publication about the conflict. There is Ptaszkowska’s letter, Kantor’s reply, related correspondence and the whole issue is in there.
M. G. - Then what? There is Paris, you find yourself in Paris, in 1970... What’s your idea of how to live? Taking photographs?
E. K. - Not really. The idea was to survive.
M. G. - However, the idea was to survive through photography, wasn’t it?
E. K. - I earned a living by breaking up engines with a heavy hammer at a car dump and Anka looked after people’s children.
M. G. - Surely that didn’t last long?
E. K. - Well, about six months! Then I began to decorate flats with a friend and one day I had an idea for doing something else, along with the physical work which earned me a living. I lived in a flat lent to me by a cousin, at least she said she was my cousin, I’m not sure it this was really true. Anyhow, I had this tiny rent-free flat and the idea for 6 Metres to Paris came to me. Anka and I walked round Paris and at its borders from a distance of six metres I took photographs of all the signs saying PARIS. Anything else that appeared in the pictures was there purely by chance. That’s how the whole series, which was also a reportage on Paris, came about.
At some stage I had a problem with extending my French visa so I went to see Mr Gassiot-Talabot, who was president of the association of French critics and asked him to write me a letter to the French police, explaining that I was working on a project in Paris and I had to stay for longer. I showed him a few photographs and he wrote the letter, which gave me a year’s extension. He also telephoned the director of musée des Arts décoratifs du Louvre, asking him to see me and my work. I showed him the photographs and they said they would organise an exhibition of them. I finished taking the 159 photographs, spending a long time on it and they offered me a huge darkroom, gave me all the printing paper, produced the posters and in the autumn the exhibition opened.
M. G. - That was a quick change of fortune then?
E. K. - After the exhibition I was offered a job as a photographer for the Louvre. I stayed there for a few years, then they transferred me to the Centre Pompidou, where I worked until I retired.
M. G. - After a while, you travelled back to Poland?
E. K. - After nine years I went back because of my father’s death. It was a strange coincidence. Things like that are always happening to me. In my letterbox I found a telegram announcing my father’s demise and at the same time a letter saying that I can collect my French passport at the town hall. I went for the passport and then straight from there to the Polish Airlines LOT. They gave me a ticket on credit because of my father’s death, I had no money to pay for it and they agreed I could settle everything in Polish currency in Warsaw, which was greatly to my advantage, since then it became a small sum, almost nothing. That very evening I arrived in Poland.
M. G. - What was it like? A shock? A blow to the system?
E. K. - A rather big one. I attended the funeral and afterwards stayed for three more weeks. At the time I still liked to have a drink now and then. I remember the Royal Castle in Warsaw burning in September 1939. I stood in the Castle Square and I could see the tower swaying in the fire and the black smoke. The caretaker from the house where we lived in Bednarska Street came running after me and told me to scram, as the German planes were flying low and could kill me. I replied that I had to see how the Castle tower was going to fall… I was fourteen years old… I stood by the John’s House, near the Sigismund Column, and at four in the afternoon the tower collapsed. I left then, but first of all I saw it collapse. I never saw the Royal Castle again, it was restored when Gierek was in power and I lived in France. The Castle had been rebuilt, then my father died, then I came for his funeral and a week later I went for a walk. At two o’clock at night I found myself in the Castle Square. I stood there, completely pissed, and I saw the castle tower swaying again, the tower I had not seen for forty years, since the day it collapsed…
M. G. - Even somebody who doesn’t know very much about you is likely to know that you produced that important book of photographs on the Cathedral at Chartres, that it was a breakthrough for you and an event of great significance… what was it all about?
E. K. - To me it wasn’t that important nor really a breakthrough. The idea behind the book was completely different to what actually happened afterwards. I was interested in light and in time. How the light changed in the context of time going by. I photographed it very systematically, every three weeks. I spent the entire day at Chartres, from sunrise to sunset. I systematically photographed the effects of light in the cathedral’s interior, with my back turned to the stained glass windows. Three weeks earlier the effects were there, then they were gone, but something else took their place, although you had to wait for a month for a new lot of them. That’s why I worked there for a whole year. Not because there was a colossal amount of work as such, but simply because sometimes a few days would pass before there was something for me to do. I photographed the same place every three minutes, I had whole series of coloured photographs showing the life of one place over fifteen minutes, or over five minutes. All the time in the colour range of those light prisms, the effects of light. I had no contact with anybody, or a contract with any publishing house.
M. G. - However, you did show your pictures to somebody, didn’t you?
E. K. - Only when they were completely finished, when I had a pile of them. I met Pierre Restany, a well-known art critic. It was a purely social meeting in fact. He sent me with my pictures to Peter Knapp, a fashion photographer and a renowned graphic designer. Knapp telephoned a publisher in Monaco. The publisher came, looked at the pictures and decided to publish them in a book. In the end it was not the company from Monaco who published the book, but Jean-Claude Lattès, a famous publishing house in Paris. I used to go there and tell them I wanted things done in a certain way, because I was interested in the effects of light. They would reply that in that case I should go to some modern art gallery, they were preparing a book for the public to read, they had to sell it and they were going to do it their way. I was not even allowed to select the photographs which appeared in the book and that’s how it was done. It was an event in my life only in so far that I became what I call ‘a success for a day’,
i.e. Paris Match published ten pages about the book, including an interview with me, ten or so other illustrated magazines followed, there was a radio programme and a talk with Bernard Pivot, presenter of a TV programme Apostrophes, which was watched by everybody.
M. G. - Why did you choose Chartres?
E. K. - I simply like the place. Normally I can’t stand visiting touristy locations, all those historic places and heritage sites, I hate doing this. Chartres is the only place I like to go to and stay there for a while.
I never use colour, unless taking pictures in black and white would be absurd. Only if colour is essential. The book on Chartres couldn’t have been done in black and white, so I’ve done it in colour. It’s true that when I photograph landscapes here, I just use a green filter, which within the grey range will differentiate between all the shades of green, rather than take pictures in colour - why do pictures in colour? However, if colour is essential for a particular photograph, its meaning, its concept and composition, then I go for colour. Otherwise, I reject colour completely. This of course goes against the current fashion, the popular demand, the commissions. All want colour, although they don’t know why they want it. There must be colour, whether it’s necessary or not. We have to have it. That’s nonsense!
M. G. - Later you had a famous exhibition in Italy…
E. K. - 6 metres to Paris has done the rounds, it was shown in Stockholm, in Moderna Museet, a famous museum of modern art created by Pontus Hulten, then it went to Rome, to Bologna and Montreal…
M. G. - Have you ever met Jean-Claude Lemagny, from Bibliothéque nationale in Paris, who said that every good photographer should offer one of his best photographs to the library’s collection?
E. K. - Yes, I had some contact with him. I can’t remember the details. As far as I can remember, I didn’t give him anything. I showed him a few pictures and wanted to sell him something. It all came to nothing, but he was a pleasant fellow…
M. G. - Have you had any contact with Polish photographers living in Paris?
E. K. - When I heard someone speaking Polish, I crossed the road, because I did not want to turn into an emigrant.
M. G. - What do you mean?
E. K. - Mainly that I tried to absorb the language, the culture and the customs of the country which had accepted me, instead of living in a Polish ghetto, where they sing Goralu czy ci nie żal (Oh man from the mountains, don’t you miss them?) when they drink vodka. I can do things like this here…
M. G. - That’s a rather one-sided point of view…
E . K. - I had no contact with Poles…
M. G. - What about Szapocznikow (Polish sculptor who lived in Paris - trans.) in Paris?
E. K. - I photographed all her sculptures and her as well.
M. G. - But there are no photographs of her…
E. K. - There are, somewhere at my place, probably not in any particular order, my archive is a complete mess…
M. G. - That reminds me, how are things with your archive… does it exist?
E. K. - Yes, I have it. It hasn’t been sorted out, because I shall either spend five years working on the archive or carry on taking pictures until I die. I prefer to do the latter. Let somebody sort it all out later or chuck it in the bin. I won’t sit at the table for four years putting it in order, as that’s how long it would take.
With the kind of life I lead in Paris, I’m glad if I can spend six hours a day in a darkroom and push things forward by producing a few prints, or else to go out and take some photographs. Not to sit down putting negatives in piles: the good ones, the useless ones…
M. G. - Have you ever tried selling your photographs through commercial galleries?
E. K. - No, never. I sold a few pictures to private collectors. As far as I can see, what sells are photographs taken in the twenties and thirties, and the 1900s. It’s very difficult to sell photographs taken currently and if it happens at all, the prices offered are so low that it’s just not worth doing. Generally there has been a boom in old photographs and I don’t think the situation has changed.
M. G. - Do you attend exhibitions in Paris? Are you interested in what the others are doing?
E. K. - I do, yes. Now and again.
M. G. - Do you have any favourite photographers?
E. K. - Jean-Loup Sieff, Man Ray… Another favourite, from the days of my youth, was Léonard Missonne, who photographed night scenes, moonlit landscapes.
M. G. - Not really somebody well-known…
E. K. - At the time when I looked at his collections of photographs he was very famous, in the fifties.
M. G. - There are a few Polish artists associated with France, for example Mariusz Hermanowicz… Piszczatowski, Zbyszek Dlubak, Krzysztof Pruszkowski…
E. K. - Well, no, certainly not Pruszkowski. There is a woman who is currently working in Warsaw, Jadwiga Sawicka. She photographed dresses. She’s very good. In my opinion the best. She showed her pictures at an exhibition at the Polish Cultural Institute in Paris, in which I also took part. I also saw some of her work at the Foksal Gallery. The poster for the streets was excellent. An event taking place on billboards. Three words, I cannot remember exactly what they were. They could have been about the relationships between men and women, in a rather nasty interpretation of them: first the preparation, then marinating, and finally the consummation…
M. G. - If somebody were to contact you in Paris, asking for portraits of Lebenstein, Szapocznikow, because you had contact with them…
E. K. - I haven’t got anything. I used to visit Lebenstein quite often for a drink, I photographed his pictures.
For the past ten years I have been living outside the normal system, where I make a phone call, I wait for the response, I keep on trying, I come and show the pictures or don’t show the pictures, somebody likes them or doesn’t like them. I have simply lost interest. I don’t care whether somebody likes the pictures, buys them or doesn’t buy them.
Perhaps I cannot really afford to behave like this, but I behave like this because I’m fed up with this whole thing in Paris. All this going here, there and everywhere, banging your head against the wall, with no result, for years and years, all those attempts, going somewhere, sending faxes, appointments, presentations, taking pictures out of your portfolio, putting pictures back in, coming and going. I simply won’t do it anymore. I’m too old for it.
M. G. - Do you take photographs just for yourself?
E. K. - I do.
M. G. - What do you photograph?
E. K. - If anything attracts my attention, I photograph it. Why it happens, I don’t know.
M G. - You get a certain kind of pleasure out of it…
E. K. - Not just pleasure. I used to suffer from really bad depression and I ended up in hospital for eight months because of it. I feel the repercussions more or less every year, in winter. Somehow it doesn’t happen here. Perhaps when I get back to Paris I’ll go to bed the next day and won’t be able to move… I’m always on pills, so obviously I have to keep away from alcohol, I can’t drink… But I still want to take pictures because I feel that I have a certain quantity of photographs, of images in me which I want to bring into being, I know that once I’m gone they will never happen. I take photographs slowly, three, four prints a day, sometimes just one. I’m moving ahead and I get pleasure out of it. Pleasure, and a feeling of some kind of inevitability.
M. G. - Going back to your beginnings once more… You said you didn’t want to work as an architect, that everything around you was ugly… and then you had a thought that despite this you want to take photographs!
E. K. - I was conscious of photography as a quite advanced amateur photographer. I developed my own films, produced prints, dried them, I did practically everything. Naturally the changeover to being a professional was a difficult step for me to take. As an amateur I could snap a little landscape or anything else and go back home, it either worked or it didn’t. When I went to work on an assignment for a newspaper and I knew that I had to bring it back, I had to be certain that I was going back and it had worked, that the next day I was going to hand it in. This cross-over to becoming a professional was very difficult for me.
M. G. - The most forming and inspiring period for you was the time spent at Polska - now we can see what great photographers Holzman and Jarosińska were…
E. K. - We can see it now, but I’m not sure that we could see it then… As far as Holzman was concerned, yes, but not so with Jarosińska, I have mixed feelings about her. When they talk about that time, they say that there were two centres: Holzman, Jarosińska, Tadzio (Rolke), Barącz and I at Polska and Kosidowski, Jarochowski, Prażuch, Sławny at Świat (The World). I actually think that Świat photographs were better, if you are talking about real reportage. Our photographs were magazine photographs. I would have preferred to take reportage photographs of the kind they did then. I really liked their photographs.
The exhibition The Family of Man by Steichen was very important to me. It played a crucial role in the entry of reportage into the realm of photography as art, although Cartier-Bresson got there before it…
Then there was the next stage for me: moving away from reportage. Giving up reportage for more intellectual photography, if it can be called that. For instance, I always had problems with photographing a human face. It always made me feel uneasy. I was facing a dilemma: I’m watching someone on the sly and then I shoot him when he is not aware of it. I felt guilty afterwards, which was not the right way to think, because in reality there is no reason why photographs shouldn’t be taken like this. Nevertheless, at a certain time of my life I had this blockage. In order to avoid photographing faces, I had this ideal which I was trying to achieve, of photographing inanimate objects in such a way that they would have all the qualities of a living human face and its expression. Another aspect of photography that has always interested me was double meaning in certain images, the elements which add a surreal touch to them. Not surrealism as such, there is no point in talking about surrealism here, a period that is gone and finished. I am talking about surreal elements in everyday reality.
M. G. - You either notice them or you don’t…
E. K. - I’m glad if I manage to capture an image with some double meaning in it.
M. G. - How do you see the future of photography, its development, computers, programs such as PhotoShop, etc… You mentioned black and white photography earlier, how will it be relevant to the modern day?
E. K. - My attitude to black and white photography has not changed for years. When we worked at Polska, colour was only accessible to us in a very limited range… but there was no talk of colour photography as such. I have always thought that colour is not an essential element of a photograph as a work of art. If we can talk about photography as art - as a creative process at any rate. We can talk about photography as something creative, not about creating a work of art. Perhaps it still isn’t art, perhaps photographs which are works of art have already been taken, by people such as Man Ray and others at the beginning of the last century…
M. G. – You are looking at it from some distance now, you are not assessing photography from the point of view of Paris and yet Paris was always a leading centre of photography…
E. K. - It was but it isn’t any longer. In my opinion Paris in general is not as strong in art as it used to be, all this has been finished for a long time…
M. G. - Everything has ‘flown’ to America?
E. K. - Perhaps it will come back, but for the time being…
M. G. - The formula for a festival of photography created in Arles over thirty years ago and then Mois de la Photo in Paris was repeated in many countries of the world…
E. K. - I went to Mois de la Photo, I looked around. I must tell you in all honesty that I never stopped there and said to myself: ‘Oh! Ah!’. Nothing like that happened to me.
From polish by Patrick Komorowski
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