COP w obiektywie przedwojennych reporterów

In early 1937, Deputy Prime Minister Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski announced an investment plan, envisaging the creation of a Central Industrial District in the forks of the Vistula and San rivers. The construction of the CID became one of the hottest topics occupying public opinion in the late 1930s. News from the construction site regularly appeared in the pages of the press of the time, from the popular Illustrated Daily Courier, to magazines such as Robotnik Polski and Plon: An Illustrated Monthly Agricultural and Horticultural Magazine, to Polish-American newspapers such as Młody Polak w Niemczech. Interwar publishers, like their contemporaries, were well aware of the importance of images in the message, so texts were accompanied by numerous photographs. Photojournalists followed the various stages of the construction of the CID.

They captured the erection of more factories and settlements, including the Rożnów Dam, the State Pulp Factory in Niedomice and Stalowa Wola. They portrayed workers, engineers, politicians and military officers responsible for the creation of the investments. They accompanied President Ignacy Moscicki and Deputy Prime Minister Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski on official visits. They documented propaganda ceremonies and the ordinary daily life of the construction site. They were interested in the details of the interiors of factory halls, machine elements, modernist facades of buildings and the work process itself: laying pipe, paving a new road, welding.  Their photos show the history of the CID on many different fronts and episodes, also through the prism of a number of events happening around the construction site: they show, among others, residents of the new housing estate, children attending the newly commissioned school, and even the great military maneuvers held in September 1938 near Rzeszow, referred to as “the battle of the CID.”

Melchior Wańkowicz’s Relay, a richly illustrated reportage documenting this one of the largest economic investments of the Second Republic of Poland, contributed most to the formation of the CID’s peculiar legend, also due to its visual side. The book had several editions before the war and became a true bestseller. It is a remarkable reminder of the enthusiasm and atmosphere surrounding the creation of a new, young Poland at that time. “It’s a modern version of reading straight out of the 19th century, a reading written to gladden hearts,” Adam Mazur wrote about the book, discussing it in a blog devoted to Polish photo books. Carefully designed graphically by Mieczyslaw Berman, one of the leading designers of the interwar period, it is also a kind of photo album of the CID construction area. Berman was famous as a creator of photomontages and also used this technique in Relay. The titles of the book’s individual chapters proposed by Wańkowicz, which descriptively emphasized the economic miracle taking place, as the CID was considered to be, gained through him an equally evocative addition in imagery, as exemplified by the photomontages From Forest and Field Poland into Armed and Industrial Poland, or Tire from a Potato.

The second photo book, where the COP is portrayed, is the little-known but very well-designed Budujemy Polskę (We are building Poland), written by Stefan Osiecki and Jerzy Skolimowski, and written by Józef Radzimiński, published in 1939 by the Main Military Bookstore. It is a story about the twenty years of independence and praises the Sanacja policy and its effects in building modern Poland, which we can admire in dozens of perfectly selected photographs. Among them is an image of a welder on the scaffolding of a factory building in Stalowa Wola, reminiscent of the famous photos of workers erecting New York skyscrapers, and a photo of a government limousine in front of a thatched country cottage, in a place where modern edifices will soon be built, and a photograph where these modernist houses are already standing, and a wooden house in the neighborhood is still holding on… Change, progress, deed, enthusiasm – these are the words that come to mind when we look at them. These photographs do not so much document as build a certain image, an epic of the COP.

Among the authors of photographs in Relay, Budujemy Polska and those appearing in the press of the twentieth century were the names of well-known reporters of the interwar period, such as Stefan Plater-Zyberk, founder of the Photo-Plat agency, and Witold Pikiel. Many of the photos were taken by photographers affiliated with the IKAC concern, the RU-AN agency, or the Polish Telegraphic Agency. Local photographers such as Wiktor Jaderny from Mielec were active, as well as various amateurs armed with a camera, who documented important events in the life of the community, such as the visit of President Ignacy Moscicki to Sandomierz in October 1937. Among them were also people connected with the CID professionally, such as engineer Bronislaw Rudzinski, responsible for the construction of Stalowa Wola. A curiosity is certainly the photographs taken by Melchior Wańkowicz, mainly depicting people encountered at the CID, as well as color photographs taken using his own technique by Juliusz Halewicz.

This exhibition does not tell the story of the formation of the CID through photographs. It does not follow a chronology or recall the most important facts about this investment.  Its aim is primarily to draw attention to photography as an art, a technique, a tool, a medium that, by capturing images of the various sites and events surrounding the construction, creates an independent story based on visual impressions and emotions, encouraging one’s own observations and interpretations. “Photography is not only a print on light-sensitive paper, it is also a mirror of the world, sometimes crooked, at other times faithful, it is an extension in time of the fleeting glimpse of the eye, it is a tool for the refinement of minds,” Ursula Czartorska wrote in her book Artistic Adventures of Photography. We propose to look at the COP through the lens of interwar reporters with our own eyes and have these words in our minds.

Idea of the exhibition: Lucyna Mizera

Curator of the exhibition: Katarzyna Zarzycka (Krakow)

Cooperation: Wojciech Chudzik (Regional Museum in Stalowa Wola)

Exhibition graphic design: Rafał Sosin