Beautiful Poland: The Kraków Region – Tadeusz Rząca | #photography & visual arts

Malownicza Polska. Ziemia Krakowska (Beautiful Poland: The Kraków Region) was probably the first Polish colour photobook. It comprises thirty-four reproductions of Tadeusz Rząca's photographs created with the technique of autochrome, considered to be the first technique of capturing true colour images.

Rząca was active as a photographer from the very beginning of the 20^th century and created the majority of his autochromes before the First World War. Malownicza Polska was published in 1920 by Herman Altenberg's Bookstore in Lviv. As the publisher's catalogue announced: 'This book features colour photographs, taken directly from nature using Lumiere's method, published for the first time in Poland. These photographs masterfully reflect the colours and inspire awe both in artists and art lovers.'

Tadeusz Rząca was a well-to-do entrepreneur and an aspiring lover of photography. His photographs are largely susceptible to the visual poetics and iconography of Young Poland. One can find here some art nouveau influences, as well as a focus on the picturesque qualities of landscape, with characteristic foreshortening and detail. The photographer's sensibility complies with the title of the publication and is targeted precisely at finding painterly frames and motifs that will be exceptionally effective on colour prints, such as gardens decorated with flowers, trees in bloom, simple genre scenes set in landscapes, which, typically of the Young Poland style, favour folk outfits and whitewashed rural cottages. The application of the groundbreaking colour technique largely explains the dependence of Rząca's photographs on their contemporary painting style. It also situates Rząca on the outside of the mainstream of pictorialist photography, represented in Poland by Jan Bułhak, whose monochromatic works were naturally enticing through their graphic qualities.

Beautiful Poland: The Kraków Region by Tadeusz Rząca – Image Gallery

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The Kraków Region in Rząca's lens is limited to Kraków and its bucolic, rural surroundings, however this small volume was intended as just the first of a larger tourist series produced by Altenberg's Bookshop. However, Rząca's sightseeing isn't ostentatious. He is interested in impressions, fragments or views of important heritage sites shot from far away. It is a modernised vision of national iconography, fitting the formalistic ambitions of the Young Poland artists rather then the meticulous photographers documenting the ethnography and national mementos who were abundant in Kraków during and before the turn of the century.

Rząca's works remained an exception for many years. The next fully colour publications did not become standard until 1970s. Publishing-wise, printing autochromes was at the end of the day not just a seminal, but also a technologically and financially demanding endeavour. The relatively small format photographs (10 x 13.5 cm on 30 x 23 cm pages) were printed on a separate sheet of a specially selected paper, and later cut and manually mounted onto pages with pre-designed typography. This, in fact, was not the first time Rząca's colour photographs were printed. A series of colour postcards based on his autochromes with views from Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, had been released a few years earlier.

photographs: Tadeusz Rząca

text: Michał Pawlikowski

graphic design: —

publisher: H. Altenberg, Publishing Bookstore in Lviv

year of publication: 1920

volume: 40 pages

format: 30 x 23 cm

cover: paperback, stitched

print run: —

ISBN —

Original text: polishphotobook.tumblr.com, transl. Ania Micińska, August 2015