Poland 1945

“No place experienced more intense suffering for a longer period of time than Poland,” the blurb on the dust jacket of Poland 1945 by Magdalena Grzebałkowska notes, “the first country to be invaded by both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and the last to be ‘liberated.'” Note the quotes around the word liberated: Poland was not in fact liberated until 1989 when the people of Poland overthrew the Communist regime put in place and propped up by the Soviet Union.

I am not sure that the history of Poland around that time is particularly well known. As someone who was born in West Germany, I certainly only knew selected parts. I knew of the Germans who had been expelled from their homes in the lands that after World War 2 became Polish. I did not know that many of the people who moved into these homes had lost theirs under very similar circumstances when vast Polish territories became part of the Soviet Union.

I knew of the Warsaw Uprising, in part because West Germany’s former Chancellor Willy Brandt fell to his knees in front of the city’s memorial, begging for forgiveness. What I didn’t know — this part was never told — was that the city had been razed to the ground by the German military following the failed Warsaw Uprising. I learned none of the details provided in the long Wikipedia page dedicated to the city’s destruction in school (or elsewhere).

Much has been made of the French-German reconciliation after World War 2. Shockingly, no similar attempts have been made to reconcile Germany and Poland, two countries that actually share more of a joint history, with Germans and Poles living in the same cities and villages for hundreds of years (until the war ended it all). To this date, the German government, so proud of its presumed coming to terms with the country’s history, refuses to even talk to Poland about actual compensation for the destruction caused by Nazi Germany.

How would one even go about writing a history of a country millions of whose people had either been murdered or scattered to different places? Where to begin — and how to fight the, I would think, inevitable despair over all the suffering?

With Poland 1945, Magdalena Grzebałkowska shows how to do it. An extremely gifted narrator who at every point of the way refuses to engage in trying to weigh someone’s suffering against someone else’s, Grzebałkowska unfolds the history of the lands within Poland’s new, 1945 borders by focusing on many of the people who for some reason found themselves there.

The book is structured in twelve chapters, following the months of the year. But this is a device more than a structure: A month is just another month — January is not more or less important than February or March, and what is described in one chapter need not necessarily have happened after something described earlier. History, after all, follows dates; but events in people’s lives do not necessarily align with those — even during or right after a massive war.

But there are sections that do follow the calendar, two pages at the beginning of each chapter that contain brief excerpts of notes from newspapers. These notes range from the mundane (“After May 25, a half kilo of marmalade will be provided for the holders of Coupon No. 4 of the April Children’s Vouchers. Price: 13 zlotys/kilogram.” — Życie Warszawy, May 25, 1945) to the heartbreaking (“I will give a baby away into good hands. Girl, 4 months. Not baptized. Distraught mother. Mokotów, 14 Lewicka Street.” — Życie Warszawy, Aug. 24, 1945). As it turned out, the mundane could often be heartbreaking — or the other way around.

The chapters focus on different aspects of Poland in 1945. There is, for example, a chapter on people coming back to their completely destroyed capital, trying to find ways to get by or to find their loved ones (or possibly their possessions) or “merely” trying not get killed by the vast amounts of mines, bombs, and ammunition left behind after the German occupiers had left. There is a chapter on a Jewish orphanage where, again, the most mundane observations are the most heartbreaking ones.

And there is a lot of devastation. So much of it. The end of the war did not mean that there would be an end to the killings or the brutality. I find it difficult to talk about any given instance, given that to name one would omit another. How or why would one be worse than the other?

While reading the book, I also kept thinking back to some of the people I had encountered a few pages earlier. What had happened to them? There was no answer. There was no way of knowing. Instead, there would be more people popping up, some of whom I’d get to know better, others who quickly fell by the wayside.

As an aside, what a grim term “falling by the wayside” is in a context in which some people literally did that, being felled by an SS guard’s bullet while marching somewhere or maybe simply being exhausted from walking hundreds of kilometers to immediately freeze to death, with other people walking past.

While strictly speaking Poland 1945 is not an oral history, Grzebałkowska’s relentless focus on mostly ordinary people, people you would never find mentioned in history books, drives home the point that we will never understand history — and we will never be able to alter its course — if we lose sight of ordinary people.

After all, history is not merely an ordered collection of events. Instead, it is a mostly unordered collections of events in which people are caught up. History does not happen. Instead, it happens to people. Some people make it out; others are less fortunate.

If we focus on not forgetting the less fortunate ones, we might have a chance to change the course of what’s unfolding before our own eyes.

Highly recommended.

Magdalena Grzebałkowska: Poland 1945 — War and Peace; translated from the original Polish by Małgorzata Markoff and John Markoff; 336 pages; University of Pittsburgh Press; 2020

If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing to my Patreon. There, you will find exclusive articles, videos, and audio guides about the world of the photobook and more. For those curious, there now is the possibility of a trial membership for seven days.

Much like journalism, photography criticism involves a huge investment of time and resources. When you become a subscriber, you not only get access to more of my work. You will also help me produce it (including the free content on this site).

There also is a Mailing List, which I use to send out supplementary materials — anything that has me inspired or that somehow seemed worth noting. Some of it is serious, some is not. You can sign up for free here.

Thank you for your support!

Japan Art Revolution

Early last year, I wrote about Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers, a documentary by Amélie Ravalec on a group of artists that in the 1960s and 70s revolutionized their country’s creative expressions. These expressions include the full gamut of what we understand as art, whether photography, printed or painted visual art (posters as much as paintings), writing, theater, dance, and more.

A new lavishly illustrated companion book has now been published in the form of Japan Art Revolution (The Japanese Avant-Garde, from Angura to Provoke). The documentary and the book complement each other perfectly, especially given that some of the expressions need to be seen as they unfold while others are static and live from being experienced with the flow of time stopped.

Examples of the former include butoh dance performances or recordings of the Hi Red Center performances. Given the time that has passed since they were staged, video recordings are all we have left to experience at least some of their impact. Examples of the latter include photography, posters, and paintings.

What I have found particularly compelling about the artists included in this look at a particularly rich moment in Japan’s cultural history is the fact that many of them interacted and worked with each other. In addition, some played more than one role. Terayama Shūji, for example, was an avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer. Nakahira Takuma was a writer and critic, photographers, editor, and translator.

In fact, almost all of the photographers included in Japan Art Revolution are the least interesting in this larger setting. With the notable exception of Hosoe Eikō none of them sought out other artists to create collaborative work (Terayama had pulled a few of them, most noticeably Moriyama Daidō, into his orbit to have them photograph underground theater, but most appeared eager to leave when they were able to).

For all the right reasons, Hosoe’s work with both writer Mishima Yukio and dancers Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo has been widely celebrated. With Mishima he created Ordeal by Roses, with Hijikata Kamaitachi.

Perhaps due to the very nature of their medium, photographers tend to be an insecure bunch, preferring to establish a lone-wolf image around themselves. Hosoe knew better. He deliberately worked with Mishima, Hijikata, and Ohno — all three incredibly strong personalities themselves — because he knew that in the give and take between two very different forms of creative expression something magical can occur.

Mishima was known for his writing, but as Donald Keene made very clear in his diaries, he was intensely focused on creating a particular image around himself, which included sculpting his body.

Both in Ordeal by Roses and Kamaitachi, the push and pull between two magnificent artists collaborating can be seen — and felt. In the former, Hosoe managed to channel Mishima’s narcissism into an utterly compelling set of photographs. In the latter, it feels as if Hosoe’s camera barely managed to contain the sheer physicality and wit expressed by Hijikata.

Japan Art Revolution is particularly interesting given that it showcases the back and forth between many of the artists featured in its pages. It is as if even as viewers far removed from the time when these pieces of art were made (or performed) we still end up enmeshed in the spider web that was created by this large group of artists.

That spider web arose out of a very specific moment in time in Japan’s post-war history, with massive protests erupting against the so-called Anpo security treaty with the United States (there is a chapter in the book) while the economy started booming and living conditions for most people became a lot better within a short period of time.

Richly illustrated, Japan Art Revolution provides a marvelous overview of what Japan’s most cutting-edge artists would produce. The illustrations are complemented by a wealth of quotes either by the artists themselves or by a number of scholars. As can be expected, the artists talking about themselves and their work yields in much insight into why things look the way they look. The experience of living under frequent bombings during World War 2 and the later occupation play very prominent roles.

Depending on where you’re coming from, you could view Japan Art Revolution as only looking back on a particular moment in Japan’s cultural history — or as asking questions about our own particular moment right now. I personally would like to think of it as doing both.

While there is much to admire in how the artists showcased in the book reacted to the troubled times they lived in, there is a lot less to admire in how today’s artists are reacting (or rather mostly not reacting) to what we are facing today.

Of course, comparing different times in history is always problematic, especially when large cultural differences come into play. Still… Will there be a book like this one about our times and our artists?

In other words, what can we learn from all of the truly gifted and fearless individuals whose work still resonates so strongly almost five decades after it was first made?

Recommended.

Japan Art Revolution — The Japanese Avant-Garde, from Angura to Provoke; editor: Amélie Ravalec; with contributions by numerous artists and writers; 320 pages; Thames & Hudson; 2026

If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing to my Patreon. There, you will find exclusive articles, videos, and audio guides about the world of the photobook and more. For those curious, there now is the possibility of a trial membership for seven days.

Much like journalism, photography criticism involves a huge investment of time and resources. When you become a subscriber, you not only get access to more of my work. You will also help me produce it (including the free content on this site).

There also is a Mailing List, which I use to send out supplementary materials — anything that has me inspired or that somehow seemed worth noting. Some of it is serious, some is not. You can sign up for free here.

Thank you for your support!

Wild Flowers

I never thought much about how collages might operate in a book context other than in a catalogue. The closest I can think of would be Jindřich Štyrský‘s Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream (I have a copy of this most recent reprint; you can access a pdf of the 1997 reprint here). But even there, while it is an artist’s book, it still does not stray very far from what a catalogue might do (except, perhaps, omit the inevitable curator essays).

There also is Hannah Höch’s Life Portrait. But that’s also not quite it, because the book presents a single large collage in smaller sections.

So what might a collage monograph look like? A possible answer has arrived in the form of James Gallagher‘s Wild Flowers: a large-scale collage itself. The book combined the collages from Gallagher’s series Desire with illustrations from the 1919 book Wild Flowers Worth Knowing.

In very broad terms, Wild Flowers covers some of the same territory Štyrský operated in. Both artists use photographs from pornographic source (Gallagher adds in some other material that, given the juxtapositions, comes across as such). Whereas the Czech surrealist used contemporary imagery, though, the American collage artist relies on older material.

We can’t fully comprehend how Štyrský’s somewhat surrealist collages might have impacted viewers around the time they were made. In retrospect, they do come across as a bit too on the nose in a somewhat vulgar Freudian sense (which, perhaps, is an unfair assessment).

In any case, Gallagher’s work with the human figures in his source material differs from Štyrský’s in that the contemporary collage artist introduces a very different type of surrealism. His bodies end up being cut strategically in places that manage to interrupt their pornographic aspects, to leave behind merely the underlying idea: effectively, he pulls the plug on any eroticism that might be had (or most of it anyway).

After all, ours is a very different world than the one Štyrský inhabited. Photographic depictions of nude bodies have become a lot more easy to come by (these days, in rather perverted ways: Elon Musk’s “AI” will turn any image you feed it into pornography).

In addition, the female body has become an essential item in our hypercapitalist world. Capitalism relies on equating the naked female body with sex (or rather the promise of it). It currently is simply impossible to think of advertizing without partly clothed or fully unclothed female bodies.

(It’s not difficult to imagine that Štyrský, were he to return from the dead, would view today’s advertizing as a surrealist’s fever dream.)

For an artist the challenge of working with erotic imagery is the fact that for a viewer there is always that one, big outcome, namely that they become at least somewhat aroused. Of course, there is nothing particularly wrong with that per se. But good art lives not only from not offering easy outcomes so easily but also from offering a variety of possibilities.

As an aside, this is the same challenge faced by photographers who for whatever reason want to take pictures of the nude figure: unless you are actually a pornographer, you don’t necessarily want to enter that territory. At the same time, if you try too hard to avoid it, things become awkward themselves (there’s nothing worse than art where a viewer can see how the artist tried too hard).

With Desire, Gallagher mostly avoids hitting one of the extremes through the distortions introduced by strategic cutting of the human figures. You would imagine that mixing in images of flowers would be too obvious. But much to my surprise, Wild Flowers works very well. There are a few collages that seem too one-dimensional, but the majority of them is not.

The book pulls a few production tricks, such as using different paper stocks for the different imagery; and there is the occasional gatefold as well. In addition, the paper choices (according to the colophon there are five different ones) evoke some of the raw imagery used for the backgrounds of many of the collages: pages from old books.

All of this combines into a lovely little production that might demonstrate how far an artist working with photographic imagery around nudity can go.

The reality might simply be that given its very nature, photography simply doesn’t contain enough artifice for nudes to reach the artistic value of other types of photography.

Through the interventions with scissors and glue, Gallagher creates just enough additional visual artifice for things to become interesting. In addition, Départ Pour l’Image (the publisher) have added the right amount of supplementary material to transcend the format of the catalogue.

Wild Flowers; collages by James Gallagher; 108 pages; Départ Pour l’Image; 2025

If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing to my Patreon. There, you will find exclusive articles, videos, and audio guides about the world of the photobook and more. For those curious, there now is the possibility of a trial membership for seven days.

Much like journalism, photography criticism involves a huge investment of time and resources. When you become a subscriber, you not only get access to more of my work. You will also help me produce it (including the free content on this site).

There also is a Mailing List, which I use to send out supplementary materials — anything that has me inspired or that somehow seemed worth noting. Some of it is serious, some is not. You can sign up for free here.

Thank you for your support!