During that time of revaluation, the inter-media artist Zygmunt Rytka photographed a TV screen. Over several years, he took more than 5,000 pictures, of which he only made a few dozen prints. The rest were stored in an archive for many years.
Rytka’s photographs captured, for instance, the frowning face of Czesław Miłosz, and snapshots from quiz shows, films, and documentary programmes. Sometimes it is impossible to define their context, so the images take on a life of their own. The frame of an old TV screen is visible in almost every shot.
During the TV/Studio 2 exhibition with Jacek Drabik in 1978, Rytka said that if Rembrandt had still been alive, he would have been working in television. Even then, he intuitively felt that the meaning of images we see on TV goes far beyond their informative or entertaining function.
The turn of the 1970s and 1980s was a time of intense propaganda on state TV channels. Built out of images from the communist Polish mass media, Photovision tells a story that can be seen as an appeal for TV viewers to be more conscious and cautious when consuming messages emanating from the screen.
