Imagine a classic, illustrated bilingual dictionary. Ideally, a dog-eared volume, the first edition of which dates back to a reality that half of modern society cannot remember. A dictionary found in a lumber room, or a dictionary that students would not pay attention to in a city library; that is the kind of dictionary that fortunately drew Andrzej Tobis’s attention.
What's more, not only did he retrieve it, but he translated it into his (our?) language. The Bildwörterbuch Deutsch und Polnisch, first published in 1954, is a bulky volume comprising more than 10,000 entries with illustrations that help to understand / visualize their definitions. The list of entries comprises common terms like ‘potato’ or ‘penguin’ but also quite ambiguous ones, such as ‘sand box’ or ‘sloping slide’.
In November 2006, almost fifty years after the publication of the first edition of the GDR dictionary, Andrzej Tobis commenced collecting and carefully cataloging new images for old entries. He commented:
The photographs illustrating the entries from the original dictionary have to be taken exclusively in Poland. The situations and objects in the photographs are neither pre-arranged nor digitally edited; they need to be found. Each entry in German and Polish has its own index number taken from the original dictionary. The photo and the entry, which is placed below it on a white bar, constitute an integral whole.
Tobis, a graduate of the faculty of painting that became his passion and profession, despite his ‘formal’ approach to the project, follows his intuition or a hunch in finding the objects to be captured on film.
Basically, my rule is not to contrive the situations shown in the pictures. They must be discovered. If I’d like to show what’s happening here now, for instance, I wouldn’t move the chair to improve the composition. I neither add nor remove anything. To sum it up, I have to find myself in a certain situation. I have to try to look at it from different sides, but in a natural way, with no extra gymnastics, no pressure. If it is possible, that’s OK. If not – sorry, I give up.
– Tobis said in an interview with Bogna Świątkowska.
The author of the ‘revised Polish edition’ presents the reader with an intentionally unfinished work. The A-Z German-Polish Illustrated Dictionary is a conceptual and contemplative artifact. Both enthusiasts of Zofia Rydet’s Sociological Record and students of anthropology or visual culture, as well as photography historians and practitioners will find the dictionary inspirational.