The profession you practise shapes you. This is especially true if it was chosen carefully and out of passion. It is not very common, though, to have the possibility to trace the biography of a person through their abandoned work. This was the case with Wacław Nowak who left architecture for photography. A monographic exhibition in the Museum of History of Photography is not only an attempt to remind people of his creative activity but also to bring back the time and atmosphere in which he created.

Additional information:
Born in 1924 in Krakow, the artist chose photography knowingly and intentionally, because he found the possibility offered by photography, to convert the floating into static and the moving into motionless, particularly appealing. This is probably the most amazing in his report photographs. The atmosphere of concentration, stillness, a specific standstill: boats pulled out of the water on the sand in Łeba, desolate, flooded squares in Venice, rifles in boats on the shore ready for hunting. Instead of action or dynamism we see naps, moments of reverie, tranquility, moments conducive to contemplation. Nowak was one of three members of the Domino group founded in 1957. They treated their models with particular delicacy and subtlety, a specific kind of distance born out of gentleness, serenity and culture was characteristic of the group. After this first period of “social photography” came a time of experiment. This originated from Nowak’s interest in work in the darkroom, in different techniques of image – building. His series of works involving acts made in the stroboscope method, using the optics of the so-called fisheye camera in a non-standard way and nearly graphic pseudosolarization (partial reversal of a negative image into a positive one) or isohelia (a technique consisting of making positives whose image is composed of many degrees of grey clearly separated from each other), were very important and innovative, according to critics. Most of the photographs he made in the last years of his life can be called a series of “still life”. It was a specific return to the beginnings of his creative activity, but on a different level. Calm and stillness emerged from awareness of the bitter truth about the condition of the world.

Urszula Czartoryska in her review of the exhibition in the Krakow Association of Polish Art Photographers writes about Nowak’s photographs as “logically developed intentions having both plastic and literary character”. The Museum of History of Photography invites us to take this amazing journey in the atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s. (Barbara Fijał)

More information in monthly "Karnet" (available from Tourist Information Centers, kiosks and bookshops) and also at: www.karnet.krakow.pl

Organizer

Muzeum Historii Fotografii
ul. Józefitów 16, 30-045 Kraków
tel: 012 634 59 32
e-mail: foto@mhf.krakow.pl
www.mhf.krakow.pl

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