Sending a photo in was, in my case, quite a financial risk, as I had to invest in high-quality film from Pewex. Fortunately, it didn’t come to nothing, as my first photo was publish after only 3 weeks of trying.
However, not everyone liked the idea of nudes being published in Perspektywy:
I remember one day when a letter from the Main Political Board of the Polish People’s Military came. They forbade all photographers from sending in and publishing nudes with the genital area visible, as masturbation in the military had become so widespread that it ‘endangered cadets’ training regimes’. Consequently, nudes started opting for strange, unnatural poses. And, of course, butts.
5 thousand dollars!
Kośnik lost his job at Film after martial law was declared. He didn’t really have to worry too much though, as he was hired almost instantly by the French agency Gamma. He was to photograph everything he could – demonstrations, protests, fights with the police, everyday life, but, most importantly – the life of the opposition. As early as the Solidarność festival, when regional structures were being established, he volunteered in the Masovia area as a photographer in order to be as close as possible to all the events connected to the movement. In the martial law period, he photographed all the protests organised by the then-illegal Solidarność until the end of the 1980s.
I gave my pictures to Gamma via the French Embassy, which was quite an unnerving undertaking. The police were used to searching everyone even approaching the embassies of Western countries. They also sometimes conducted house searches, and, most often, destroyed cameras during protests. However, this practice was foreseen by Gamma, who gave me a Nikkormat camera: a bulky, incredibly heavy piece of equipment made especially for war reporters. During one of the protests a Security Service member threw it down the staircase where I was hidden. It barely got scratched.
After a year of such a work, Kośnik finally went to Paris, to get money from the bank where the agency had opened an account for him. It turned out that he’d amassed 5 thousand dollars – the equivalent of around 250 average yearly Polish wages.
Of course, the photos with the highest demand were those of Lech Wałęsa. Photographers went to Gdańsk after even the slightest hint of him doing or saying something important.
When he received a Nobel Prize the whole country was celebrating. It was a breakthrough that awakened us from depression and slumber. This prize, we felt, was for all of us, for each of the 10 million people that had joined Solidarność.
‘Pacuła called in the middle of the night’
Throughout the 1980s, Kośnik was still working on his nudes. Even though he had nowhere to publish them, his exhibitions organised by various students’ clubs met with high attendance. The situation changed drastically after the transformation in 1989, when one after another different erotic magazines started appearing. He started working for magazines such as Plejtboj, for whom he photographed, among others, Ewa Sałacka. One of his favourite models was Joanna Pacuła:
She sometimes called me at midnight, saying: ‘You know, I’m at some boring banquet, get you ass here, bring a six-pack and a camera and we’ll take some photos’. Sure, most of the photos taken during these alcoholic sessions landed in the rubbish, but some of them are really dear to me, especially the one where Joasia is wearing my sock with the number 34 on them.
Among the stars that Kośnik photographed you can find such names as Jim Jarmusch, Anna Dymna, Richard Gere, Janusz Gajos, Nastassja Kinski, Roger Moore, John Travolta, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Grace Jones, and many more. His nude of Anna Dymna from 1979 was included in Jerzy Lewczyński’s list of Best 100 Polish photographs, and his photo of Joanna Janikowska taken in Cannes in 1995 for Playboy appeared in Playboy’s album 100 Most Beautiful Girls in the World.
Author: Krzysztof Miękus, April 2017. Translated by AS