The genre scene captured in this photo seems effortless and authentic. This stands in contrast to the dominant fashion of the time for posed studio photography. Rozmowa V (Conversation V) is part of the series made by Jerzy Benedykt Dorys (actually Rotenberg) on one of the summer days between 1930 and 1932. The pictures taken with a 35 mm Leica weren’t published or even printed before the War. They only saw daylight thirty years after they were taken, during Dorys’ exhibition in 1960. The specific postponing of the reception of the series from Kazimierz nad Wisłą resulted from the dismissive attitude the author and the artistic circles had toward 'snapshot' – as it was called at that time – photography.
It is certain that Dorys didn’t photograph the town which was populated to a large extent by poor Jews in order to criticize social relations. The series consists of exotic frames from another world at which the artist’s eye glimpsed. It’s hard not to notice that Dorys looked at the poverty that existed in the vicinity of the town’s market square from an external point of view - almost as a tourist. He glanced like someone for whom the members of the elite who were photographed in studios in an artistic pictorial style were the right company (in 1929 Dorys founded a fashionable studio in Warsaw in which he photographed carefully styled film and theatre stars and the bourgeois society). The excursion to Kazimierz nad Wisłą and the testing of the new camera were kind of an extravagance considering the photographer’s everyday work. Whatever the nature of the impulse was that made the photographer record the scenes from the life of the town’s community on film, it was that impulse that brought about the creation of this unusually valuable document. Adolf Rudnicki wrote the following about the series from Kazimierz nad Wisłą in Niebieskie kartki (Blue Pages):
This series has everything that is required for the world that doesn’t exist any more to come to life. The scent, the climate, the temperature, the people – everything is authentic. This is a world of bitter, hurtful poverty, of shacks, mud, barefooted and ragged children that are playing a step away from the gutter, of miserable stores that contain nothing but a jar of pickled cucumbers, a kilogram of sweets or a barrel of kerosene. This is a world rich and soft in its poverty, which isn’t strapped to any organizational reins, a world that survived one conflagration and is awaiting another, a dramatic, full and sleeping world which awaits a disaster and has no power to protect itself from the upcoming catastrophe… These photographs cannot be absorbed without taking into account the later occurrences with which the pictures are organically intertwined. All of these photographs seem to be pictures from the last summer – from before the deluge.
Rudnicki’s words may also be related to the photographs of Poland made by Roman Vischniac (Wiśniak), Menachem Kipnis, Alter Kacyzne or by the photographers employed by foreign agencies and magazines (for instance Louis Arner Boyd from National Geographic) who photographed the culture of small towns and Jewish shtetls, which differed from the Western culture of small settlements. Dorys’ photographs seem exceptionally interesting on this background thanks to a certain 'invisibility' of the author which was made possible by reduction in the distance between the photographer and the photographed, made possible by the invention of the 35 mm roll-film camera, which enabled the taking of candid photographs. Dorys himself eloquently described this:
The Leica turned out to be simply wonderful. It above all offered one a chance to photograph secretly. Nevertheless one often had to endlessly lie in wait with a concealed camera pretending that one is picking one’s nose.
Paradoxically, the photographs from Kazimierz nad Wisłą made by a professional portraitist and great creator of nudes, are considered by such critics as Jerzy Bursa as 'the first modern photo-reportage, which makes use of already contemporary techniques and the style of presenting the relationship of reality through the photographic medium'.
Author: Adam Mazur, March 2014
Translated by: Marek Kępa
Benedykt Jerzy Dorys
Kazimierz nad Wisłą / Rozmowy V (Kazimierz on the Vistula / Conversations V)
1931-1932
print made on silver-gelatine paper
12,2x16,2 cm