Vistula – Jan Styczyński | #photography & visual arts

Wisła (Vistula) is a typical propaganda album about the Polish People's Republic. The common subject matter is, however, nuanced here by choosing the queen of Polish rivers, which has for centuries been of key importance to the Polish national identity (and in the past also for the country's economic condition), as the lead theme.

Styczyński's album evidently conforms to the topos of the river as a symbolic figure – just like in the Rodło emblem (used by the Union of Poles in Germany). The idea behind the book is also simple, as it is based on a journey the photographer took along the Vistula's riverside: from its source in the Beskids all the way to the estuary at the Baltic. The dense photographic narrative is intertwined with typographically compelling excerpts from literary classics, such as Jan Kochanowski, Julian Tuwim, Bolesław Prus, and Władysław Broniewski.

The titular Vistula serves the photographer as a pretext to elaborate on a story about a sunny day in a socialist country. It is a book about progressing modernisation, about a Poland in which everything flows towards a better future, along with the current of a river: this river. Besides being consistently enchanted by the beauty of the landscapes by the Vistula, Styczyński also doesn't hesitate to step off the route to photograph Auschwitz-Birkenau, and he finds pleasure in documenting both historic and modern cities, villages, and factories. The classic propaganda theme of the clash between old and new appears here – we see juxtaposed photos of wooden boats and a modern shipyard, and a view of Warsaw's Royal Castle and the newly built Eastern Wall. As ambivalent as one can be towards the Polish People's Republic's propaganda publications and photographers following a script enforced by the authorities, it is hard to deny Wisła's charm.

Vistula by Jan Styczyński - Image Gallery

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The book stands out among other tourist propaganda albums about Poland through the high quality of Styczyński's photographs and their often smart layout. The whole follows a convention of snapshot photo reportage with modern artistic inclinations. Especially impressive is the method of pairing photographs on traditionally composed spreads (one image per page), which in fact is also characteristic of the photographer's other publications. Styczyński not only follows his intuition and graphic imagination, but also a somewhat grotesque sense of humour, occasionally combining very bold motifs, and thus rendering them slightly abstract and perverse. One will recognize the influence of Hartwig's Fotografika here. The photographs are nonetheless appealing and engrossing in themselves. Thanks to all of that, Wisła is nowadays intriguing, not just as a relic of socialist visual culture, but also as a testimony to the sophisticated photographic and publishing culture of that time.

Finally, it is a source of inspiration. A portrait of the poet Władysław Broniewski included in the book served Wilhelm Sasnal, a representative of a generation that entered adulthood together with the fall of communism, as the basis of one of his most foremost paintings, referring to an ambiguous post-communist identity. This led to the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw purchasing a series of Styczyński's photographs from Wisła forty years after the book's release.