The largest festival, Fotofestiwal in Łódź, not only stages a main exhibition and star shows featuring names like Yorgos Lanthimos, but also runs a citywide programme and supports grassroots – even openly amateur – initiatives, thereby animating the local community. The Łódź event is also deeply embedded in the photo book network, which this year brought a crop of premieres drawing international attention to Polish photography as a whole. During Fotofestiwal, this focus on photographic publications took concrete shape in exhibitions, such as: Let’s Play Photobooks!, which was dedicated to photo books for children; a survey of publications on Palestine; In Protest We Trust, which presented politically-engaged books; and a review of maquettes by debut authors.
A permanent – and crucial – element of Fotofestiwal is the Krzysiek Makowski Award for the Photographic Publication of the Year, which this year went to both WET PAINT by the Studio Prokopiou duo (edited by Łukasz Rusznica, published by Archiwum Słońca) and Weronika Gęsicka’s Encyclopaedia, published by Blow Up Press and Galeria Jednostka. It is a meaningful pairing: a queer album by a legendary Greek photo studio, released by a publisher that emerged from the ruins of Wrocław’s Miejsce przy Miejscu gallery, alongside a fake encyclopedia by a Polish artist enjoying global success thanks to image manipulation and her pioneering use of algorithms to produce art.
Competition was exceptionally fierce this year, and it is clear that at a time when mainstream photography is shifting towards algorithmic dominance – manifested in the withering of press and commercial photography, the decomposition of amateur clubs and union-based movements – the seemingly archaic medium of the book has become a valued alternative mode of expression.
It is worth stressing that after decades in which Polish photographers struggled to secure publication in the West, we have reached a point where, thanks to high standards in editing, design, print and committed distribution, a Greek-London duo has choosen to publish their book with a Wrocław-based press, and leading international artists are queuing up to work with a Warsaw publisher. Equally significant is Gęsicka’s international success, rooted in a practice as pioneering as it is witty in combining image manipulation with the aesthetics of hallucinatory algorithms and formats such as the illustrated encyclopedia – emblems of an era visibly fading before our eyes.
This trend was confirmed towards the end of the year by the Paper Photo Festival in Katowice, a photographic publications festival organised by Jakub Dziewit. WET PAINT received an award there too, providing a useful point of departure for discussions about Polish photography stepping beyond national borders, as well as about the relationship between photography, photo books and the LGBT+ community – a community that, until recently, was barely represented in this field, if at all.
The slow, long-term work of masters’ legacies