He never gave up photography, but only took pictures of family and friends. After 1989, he asked his sister Eugenia to send him the camera his mother had salvaged together with bags of negatives from his Białystok workshop on the night her son was arrested. As it turned out, Augustis’ father had been a wealthy merchant who could afford a Leica. To avoid repression at the hands of the Soviet commissars, the Augustowicz family had fled to Poland (but why only in the 1930s, not earlier with thousands of other returning Poles?) and changed their surname for security. Many questions will remain unanswered, for Augustis died in 1995.
Augustis also has an enthusiastic manager in Grzegorz Dąbrowski, who has observed the positive changes that accompany such discoveries: ‘They generate awareness. Social archives and discovering one’s roots have become trendy. People contact us to donate various objects, instead of throwing them away. Apart from Augustis, we now have more material from Białystok and the area, because when compiling albom.pl, we also decided to browse other private archives.’ In so doing, they were able to revive the work of Jerzy Kostko, who ran a photo workshop in Kleszczele. He joined the ranks of other fortunate ‘rediscovered’ photographers: Stefania Gurdowa from Dębica, Michał Greim from Kamieńiec Podolski, and Henryk Ross, who documented the Łódź ghetto.
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Jerzy Lewczyński, photographic artist and promoter of the concept of ‘photographic archaeology’ believed that negatives are ‘authentic witnesses of past events’. Thanks to photography, ‘the continuity of visual contact with the past creates opportunities to extend the influence of creative cultural layers into the present’. The Sleńdziński Gallery in Białystok organised a series of exhibitions inspired by Augustis’ work, juxtaposing his photographs with shots of contemporary Białystok residents taken by Anna Sierko-Szymańska. The pictures are similar in style, as are the ages and facial features of their subjects. One visitor to the exhibition noted that the direction of one-way traffic had altered along Kiliński Street.
In her essay for the book Augustis 2.0, Aneta Prymaka-Oniszk recalled Icchak Perłow’s words about Białystok: ‘You, my most handsome of sons.’ The Jewish poet wrote a song of wartime homesickness. Today, the city dreams a different dream.
Originally written in Polish by Agnieszka Warnke, August 2019, translated by Mark Bence, Sept 2019
