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Meeting with Agnieszka Pajączkowska, author of the book Opaque: Stories of Peasant Photography
Moderation: Katarzyna Gębarowska
09.10.2024, 18:00
Audiovisual room, MOB, Gdańska 4
The event will be held in Polish only.
Peasant photography, especially family and private collections, usually does not have a distinct place in archives or institutions. For many decades, it garnered little interest and was not considered part of the "national heritage." The scant number of preserved collections allows us to imagine how many photos and stories have been irretrievably lost, burned, discarded, or never found.
Photography is not transparent – it does not show "simply", neutrally, or objectively. Similar to history, when written from only one perspective. Much in the interpretation of photography and history depends on the angle of viewing, the preserved material, and noticing what has been previously overlooked.
Agnieszka Pajączkowska describes selected peasant photographs, supplementing her observations with interviews, oral history records, documents, micro-reports, theoretical reflections, quotes from essays on photography, and new insights into folk history. The core of the book remains the question of what we actually see. What does photography not show and not decide? It is less a story about the people visible in the photos and more about the photos themselves and those who took them – the photographers, their motivations, their work techniques, and their place in the rural community. Viewed in this way, peasant photographs allow us to look at 20th-century Polish history from a less obvious perspective.
Opaque attempts to draw attention to what has so far been too rarely noticed – the third plane, the background, things, and people outside the frame.
Agnieszka Pajączkowska (b. 1986) – a cultural scholar, researcher of everyday photographic practices, creator of interdisciplinary, photographic, and cultural projects, author of books and articles, cultural animator, curator, tutor, and a graduate of doctoral studies at the Institute of Polish Culture at the University of Warsaw. She is the author of the project and book Traveling Photography Studio (Czarne Publishing House, 2019) and Opaque: Stories of Peasant Photography (Czarne Publishing House, 2023). In her work, she combines academic reflection with creative practice and social art. She is interested in the craft and utilitarian history of photography and its connections with everyday practices, archives, and local history. In 2015 and 2020, she was a scholarship holder of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage in the "Visual Arts" field.
In 2019, together with Aleksandra Zbroja, she published the book What Did You Think? Meetings with Women from Mazovian Villages. Since 2018, she has been a member of the program board of the Fort Institute of Photography in Warsaw. She collaborated with the History Meeting House in Warsaw on the photo exhibition Family Album: VIEWS (together with Monika Szewczyk-Wittek). She is the author of the exhibition What Do You See? Looking at Archival Photographs in Gdynia at the Museum of the City of Gdynia.
She co-created projects such as School of Looking (Fort Institute of Photography), Recovered Identities: Interventions, Snapshots and Visual Seminar (Creative Initiatives Association "ę"), Something That Will Remain: Local Actions with Zofia Rydet's Sociological Record (Zofia Rydet Foundation). As an author and animator, she collaborated with, among others, the Creative Initiatives Association "ę," the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and the Foundation for the Archaeology of Photography. She has published in, among others, "Contexts," "Holocaust Studies," "Culture and History," "View," "small contemporary culture," "Res Publica," "Biweekly," "Political Critique," "View," and "High Heels."
For the book Traveling Photography Studio, she received the Wiesław Kazanecki Award and the Beata Pawlak Award and was nominated for the Ryszard Kapuściński Award and the Stanisław Barańczak Award.
Moderation:
Katarzyna Gębarowska – PhD of Art Sciences, a researcher in the history of photography, a curator of photographic exhibitions, a publisher of books, and the president of the Fotografistka Foundation. She specializes in the history and critique of photography, particularly focusing on early photography. In her research, she concentrates on vernacular photography and herstory. She has curated exhibitions such as "Eros and Thanatos: Bydgoszcz Pioneers of Professional Photography 1888–1945" (MOB 2019) and "A View from Above: The Archive of Wanda Rutkiewicz" (Silesian Museum 2023). She is a co-author of the books "Women of Photon" (2018) and "Profession: Fotografistka" (2019). Since 2015, she has been the director of the Vintage Photo Festival - an International Festival for Analog Photography Lovers. Since 2023, she has served as an assistant at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Nicolaus Copernicus University.