From Szymon Rogiński's "Wir in Dresden" series
The young photographer confronts his mentor's approach to the nude and the depiction of the body
The title of the exhibition takes its cue from Zbigniew Dłubak's Gesticulations and Systems series, juxtaposing his particular style of photographing the nude body with Rogiński's Wir in Dresden. Szymon Rogiński started studying to be an actor at the Devero School on Wheels, where the focus of his education was the use of the body as a tool for presentation and performance. Many taboos on intimacy were broken in the process of coming into close contact with other actors. Nudity became commonplace, giving him an unfettered view on the role and physical aspect of the body. Stepping outside the bounds of male-dominated popular culture, his photographs portray his friends freely enjoying themselves in the waves of the North Sea. It is essentially a recording of a moment, in which nudity is one of several elements that create the image.
This vision is set against the rigors of Zbigniew Dłubak's imagery. In the 1970s Dłubak photographed his models according to a very strict set of guidelines, taking a rather chilly approach to the body. The anonymous female forms against a black background are exacting and mathematical, negating the typically soft, emotional nature associated with the female body. In essence the project is not at all about the calculated gestures the women present in the photos, but rather the women themselves, the body itself. Collectively the photographs trace out a story about the woman's body.
The exhibition presents the photographs of Rogiński and digitally animated images by Dłubak, along with some works in progress from Dłubak's Ocean series. These diverse series is the result of Rogiński's singular perspective on the archives of a mentor, shown as part of the Live Archives series.
Szymon Rogiński (born 1975) studied photography at the School of Artistic Photography in Gdańsk. Between 2000-2004 he took photos for the Gazeta Wyborcza daily, shifting to art photography in 2004. His most well-known projects are Poland Synthesis and UFO. His works have been shown across Poland and in Brussels, Prague, Berlin, Budapest and Vienna.
Zbigniew Dłubak (born 1921, died 2005) was a self-taught art theoretician, painter and photographer. His primary goal was for the latter two to gain recognition as two separate forms of artistic expression. Inspired by his own theories of existence and a short she'd story he'd written Dłubak executed a series called Existences 1959-66. These photographs were documentary in nature, drawing cutes from American photography from the Farm Security Administration era. In 1967 he presented his Iconosphere series, which became an important stepping stone in Polish photography on the road to breaking down the concept of artistic photography. He initiated a series of Exhibits of Subjective Photography in 1968 and the exhibition Photographers in Pursuit in 1971. In 1970 he began studying the symbolism of the body within Gestures series. He later became interested in the concept of contextual art. In the early 1980s he began living in Meudon outside of Paris, where he worked extensively on his art, before returning to Warsaw for the last years of his life.
The exhibition opens on the 31st of August at 7:00 p.m. It runs through the 24th of September at the Archaeology of Photography Foundation (ul. Andersa 13, building VII, buzzer 112).
Curator: Karolina Lewandowska
For more information, see: www.archeologiafotografii.pl
Editor: Agnieszka Le Nart
Source: Archaeology of Photography Foundation