The Song of Wawel – Adam Bujak | #photography & visual arts

Pieśń Wawelu (The Song of Wawel) is definitely a work typical for its time and yet also visually unique. The album's exceptionality is the result of a specific combination of content and photographic material with its form of publication.

The project, which was intended as a propagandist superproduction, having faced the printing scarcities prevalent in the Poland of the late seventies and early eighties, became an extraordinary, almost psychedelic hybrid, which from today's perspective comes across as intriguing and inspiring – though not necessarily in the way that its authors had imagined.

The book documents annual outdoor light and sound events organized at the foot of Wawel Hill between 1972 and 1977, “out of inspiration and with the active participation of comrades from the Kraków unit of the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR)”. Those shows, staged and directed by Krzysztof Jasiński and largely based on plays by Stanisław Wyspiański, were an attempt at a spectacular visual historiography, featuring puppets of Polish kings, poets, national heroes, and figures promoted by the propaganda of the Polish People's Republic as founders of the revolutionary and proletariat movement – Edward Dembowski and Ludwik Waryński, who spoke as if they were ghosts of the past (and future). Wawel – the Polish Acropolis, as Wyspiański referred to it – seems to become the spiritual (therefore paradoxical) epicentre of socialist Poland, veiled in smoke and lights, amongst an artistic aura of a theatrical mega-production, the so-called “immense theatre” (to borrow an expression from Wyspiański's Wyzwolenie/Liberation).

The Song of Wawel by Adam Bujak – Image Gallery

Embeded gallery style

Display slider (default)

In the album, photographic documentation of night-time performances intertwines with views of Wawel's architecture, details of royal tombs and of arms from the Castle's collection, as well as excerpts from Wyspiański's writings. The narrative is complemented by behind-the-scenes photographs of rehearsals and preparations for the spectacles. Accompanying the book is an analogue single with musical out-takes from the shows, which helps one to better feel the atmosphere of these total productions, which engaged, apart from numerous artists, craftsmen, and actors, whole battalions of the Polish People's Army.

The author of the photographs – Adam Bujak – at the time already established as an author due to the prominent series Misteria (Passion Plays) in which he documented the customary forms of Polish religious rituals, here elaborates his creative vision of Kraków as a magical place. In a bold, or maybe even bodacious move, he decided to this time introduce colour. His nocturnes, capturing the light effects above the Wawel Hill or the smoke-covered surface of the Vistula River, are imbued with an uninhibited photographic impression, which, when combined with the nonchalant offset print and chalk overlay paper of poor quality, produces completely inconceivable effects that were certainly far from the author's intention. It seems as though, for Bujak, documenting the Wawel spectacles was not only a dream way of making an income, but also an opportunity to demonstrate his skills in full. The publication however caricatures them in an intriguing way, probably partly due to the imperfect photographic materials. The book's graphic designer, aware of the publishing limitations, made interesting manoeuvres that enabled him to use the crude possibilities to his advantage. Hence, on the pages with typography, colour is introduced exclusively in pure CMYK values – yellow, magenta, or cyan. Additionally, a selection of photographs that were originally black and white, was printed in monochrome shades of green, blue, and purple. When all of the above is mixed with the multi-colour pastel-toned prints, some truly peculiar colour combinations surface on subsequent spreads. All of these publishing mistakes and shortfalls – at the time provoking dejection and pity – nowadays intrigue with their fantastical visual side effects that are inspiring and not that easy to repeat by means of contemporary printing techniques. Bujak's photographs – nebulous, to some extent basically abstract views, bursts of lights and oversized puppets – altogether create a unique, surrealist, and psychedelic whole, which is as expressive as it is accidental.