Willows – Edward Hartwig | #photography & visual arts

“Where the willow woods rustle in the fields, I know that Poland begins and ends”*, proclaims a poem opening the book by one of the masters of photography, Edward Hartwig. This book, published in 1989, is one of author's later albums and at the same time an obsessive summa of his most celebrated motif.

Hartwig introduced willows into many of his works and by the same token proved that the rich symbolism and imagery connected to these trees also carries a photographic resonance. The book comprises photographs taken over the course of half a century, including early, and even pre-war, pictorial pictures, as well as post-war ones – modern and graphic-like.

Willows, willows, willows. Hartwig's book, qualifying as one of his strangest or even manic and obsessive works, borders on photography, visual arts, and graphic design. Willows offer a pretext to constructing extremely expressive, black and white images. In many of them, Hartwig even goes as far as anthropomorphising the leitmotif. Despite the monothematic title, the book is far from boring. The photographer effectively escapes a dull typology and creates a multi-layered photographic passage, a true Hartwig freestyle, a black and white, blank verse poem about willow trees. This is at the same time a kind of tour de force – a long-term exercise carried out by a master who confirms his class by presenting a plethora of ways of tackling one subject.

Willows by Edward Hartwig – Image Gallery

Embeded gallery style

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Visually, the book is not too far from Hartwig's typical works from the 1960s. The difference, however, consists in a radical reduction to a single theme. Paradoxically, this situates the publication one shelf above his other, often quite eclectic publications. Wierzby (Willows) seems to be more deliberate, and hence more contemporary. On the other hand, however, one ought to remember that this was representative of Hartwig's later years of activity.

“Hartwig's landscapes often constitute a kind of enchanting spectacle, especially when he applies that silvery shade which makes the texture of trees and shrubs look as if woven out of angel hair, making for a remarkable natural decoration”, states an excerpt by Julia Hartwig, whose poetic phrases appear in the book, just like in her brother's earlier albums. Contrary to her bright and pure verses, Edward Hartwig proposes a rather dark nocturne. The initially declared link between willows and Polishness becomes diluted page after page. The photographs flow more and more freely towards formal improvisation. Subsequent images play with light, forms, and contrast, leading to an almost musical abstraction. The whole comes across as a gloomy, threatening, over-expressive, and far from idyllic vision of a landscape. It is rather a dramatic story about its end, and at the same time Hartwig's journey to the end of photography. There is nothing more that can be done with this theme and genre. However, this definitive tone makes Wierzby escape sentimentality and naive romanticism, characteristic of many tourist albums from the era.

With regards to publishing, the book is not as attractive as the author's earlier titles, which can be explained by the time of its production. Having been released in the last year of Polish People's Republic, the album is bound in an ordinary hardcover without a dust jacket, while the black areas occasionally lose a bit of depth.

* poem excerpt translated in Martin Price's article “Resonating with the Highway” in Quaderns d'arquitectura i urbanisme, no. 218 (1997): Rethinking mobility