DOI Artikel:
Leśniakowska, Marta: Architektura i jej obrazy: fotografia, modernizm, historiografia; fotografie Czesława Olszewskiego
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.14575#0208
198
MARTA LEŚNI AKOWSKA
ARCHITECTURE AND ITS IMAGES. PHOTOGRAPHS BY CZESŁAW OLSZEWSKI
Abstract
The article pertains to the relationship between photography, modernism and historiography. It's a proposai of a différent read-
ing of architecture photography which is treated as a posed 'portrait' of modernism with the purpose of réalisation an adequately
designed représentation of modernist architecture. The stimulus was provided by the photographs by Czesław Olszewski (1894-1969)
from the 1930s taken for the leading Polish periodicals of the interwar period {Architektura i Budownictwo - Architecture and Build-
ing Trade, Arkady - Arcades). In their 'foreground' these photographs documented an international style présent in Poland, the ré-
alisations of young Warsaw architects from among 'the génération of ca. 1900' and the peers of the photographer, so it is a sort of
a generation's manifeste. The authoress, however, points out the problematics of the broad term of a 'documentation photography',
the apparent neutrality and false 'objectivity' of camera (photography); she refers to the model of the Allan Sekula's archives as
a 'territory of images' which reveals a new sensé of a 'document' as a memory relie. Black-and-white photograms are the 'images'
of architecture that imitate the ways of représentation known from the paintings of the 1930s, and as représentations they deriva-
tively aesthetieize this architecture. The fact that this is monochromatic photography allows to inscribe it into the project of création
of the image of modernism seen as the culture of 'white walls'. Ideologists of modernism made use of the 'lack of colour' of pho-
tography to create an image (définition) of modernist architecture as an abstract 'play of white forms in the light'. In this way one
of the modernist dogmas was realised pertaining to: 1) the question of space, and 2) the colour and/or lack of it as a sign and réfé-
rence. Thus, modernism identified with the culture of 'white architecture' situated thereby on the plane of designed by modernism
historiographie tradition that reveals here its feature: as an aesthetic construct. The authoress recalls the new analyses which criticise
modernism as the 'culture of white wall' and disclose the relationship between the 'white wall' and patriarchal scénario with the
purpose to create the avant-garde art as a 'maie' area (gender théories, psychosexual basis of architecture, postcolonial theory inter-
preting a 'culture of whiteness' as domination of the white race etc.). At the end of the text there is presented the relationship between
the 'beautiful portraits' of avant-garde architecture and 'rhetoric of wandering' and narration: the buildings in the photographs taken
by Olszewski had been build before 1939 and were either destroyed during the WWII or devastated in the communist times. For
this reason the authoress interprets them like the pictures with typical utopian scheme: a convention of journey and référence to
nostalgia, which inscribes them into the discourse upon memory and history.
Translated by Grażyna Waluga
MARTA LEŚNI AKOWSKA
ARCHITECTURE AND ITS IMAGES. PHOTOGRAPHS BY CZESŁAW OLSZEWSKI
Abstract
The article pertains to the relationship between photography, modernism and historiography. It's a proposai of a différent read-
ing of architecture photography which is treated as a posed 'portrait' of modernism with the purpose of réalisation an adequately
designed représentation of modernist architecture. The stimulus was provided by the photographs by Czesław Olszewski (1894-1969)
from the 1930s taken for the leading Polish periodicals of the interwar period {Architektura i Budownictwo - Architecture and Build-
ing Trade, Arkady - Arcades). In their 'foreground' these photographs documented an international style présent in Poland, the ré-
alisations of young Warsaw architects from among 'the génération of ca. 1900' and the peers of the photographer, so it is a sort of
a generation's manifeste. The authoress, however, points out the problematics of the broad term of a 'documentation photography',
the apparent neutrality and false 'objectivity' of camera (photography); she refers to the model of the Allan Sekula's archives as
a 'territory of images' which reveals a new sensé of a 'document' as a memory relie. Black-and-white photograms are the 'images'
of architecture that imitate the ways of représentation known from the paintings of the 1930s, and as représentations they deriva-
tively aesthetieize this architecture. The fact that this is monochromatic photography allows to inscribe it into the project of création
of the image of modernism seen as the culture of 'white walls'. Ideologists of modernism made use of the 'lack of colour' of pho-
tography to create an image (définition) of modernist architecture as an abstract 'play of white forms in the light'. In this way one
of the modernist dogmas was realised pertaining to: 1) the question of space, and 2) the colour and/or lack of it as a sign and réfé-
rence. Thus, modernism identified with the culture of 'white architecture' situated thereby on the plane of designed by modernism
historiographie tradition that reveals here its feature: as an aesthetic construct. The authoress recalls the new analyses which criticise
modernism as the 'culture of white wall' and disclose the relationship between the 'white wall' and patriarchal scénario with the
purpose to create the avant-garde art as a 'maie' area (gender théories, psychosexual basis of architecture, postcolonial theory inter-
preting a 'culture of whiteness' as domination of the white race etc.). At the end of the text there is presented the relationship between
the 'beautiful portraits' of avant-garde architecture and 'rhetoric of wandering' and narration: the buildings in the photographs taken
by Olszewski had been build before 1939 and were either destroyed during the WWII or devastated in the communist times. For
this reason the authoress interprets them like the pictures with typical utopian scheme: a convention of journey and référence to
nostalgia, which inscribes them into the discourse upon memory and history.
Translated by Grażyna Waluga