Witness 2
Photographs: Krakow: Gerald Howson and Bogdan Frymorgen
About This Exhibition
As part of the VASA Witness Project (see menu at left), we are presenting the photographic work of Gerald Howson and Bogdan Frymorgen. Both photographers are currently living in England. (Howson in his 90s and Frymorgen, originally from Poland, is in his 40s.)
We learned of Howson’s post-War Krakow photographs from Bogan’s Facebook site where he has been displaying a full range of his and Howson’s work since their meeting. What drew our attention to the work of Frymorgen and Howson was that both photographers were photographing in the same areas of Krakow 50 years apart. Each photographer employed the language “of the day” to record and to notate their relationships to Krakow. Howson was in post-war Krakow to make photographs for the Royal Magazine (the manuscript and images were never published), and Frymorgen worked from an interpretive position, making images that for him moved past pure reportage into the interpretive paradigm.
Gerald Howson was photographing in Krakow as part of an essay on post-World War II reconstruction of Krakow. His style emerged from the humanist and photo-journalist tradition. Frymorgen’s images, on the other hand, were made in the first decade of the twenty-first century some sixty years after the war and about fifteen years after the end of occupation. His images draw from the documentary and interpretive paradigms. For each, Krakow and more precisely the Jewish Quarter, became the platform for their own interpretive expressive record of the conditions of post-war and post-occupation.
Gerald Howson’s work falls squarely in the tradition and boundaries of humanism and the reportage tradition. What could be the straight out of photo magazines of the day (Life, Look, Time as USA examples), Howson speaks to the efforts of a population to return to normalcy. Throughout this collection of images we are given views of children playing in the war’s rubble, men gathered together playing cards, and woman working, socializing, and shopping on the street (market places, parks). The approach taken gives the impression of neutrality, seeing the camera as an objective machine, the basis of Howson’s work. In reading Gerald Howson’s images the reader may unpack a sense of horror and its implications, considering that the images were taken for the most part in the Jewish Quarter expands the context even further. Children playing on a background of destruction, people attempting to regain the rhythm of their lives, and an empty baby carriage – infertility, all refer to the painful rebuilding of lives and a society after the devastation of war. Yet, there is a hopeful reading framed by this collection. The image of a young girl perched upon a wall, a floating angel, people on the street and children playing, point the reader towards a sense of salvation. The work of Howson, in post-war Krakow, seen from the second decade of the twenty-first century with all of its man-made horrors, may be read, in the end, as a message of resilience and hope.
Fifty years later Bogdan Frymorgen, walking through the same Jewish Quarter streets, was not seeing the world of Howson. Absent for the most part from his images are people, the sense of renewal and hope, the reconstruction of life. In Frymorgen’s images we do not see the angel of hope, but the sense of dispare, a lonelyness, after almost 60 years of no life. We are shown empty market places in the darkness of winter, back alleys and building facades, uncared for that sing of a better time. When the viewer is given images of people they are absent of any life, cold stares, solitude within the crowd. The image of the woman, walking right to left, counter to abstracted representations leading to the illusion of a better time, a better life. This is Frymorgen’s image, one that after 50-60 years of ideological and economic repression, lead to only images not of a better life, or an angel of hope.
The work of Gerald Howsen and Bogdan Frymorgen’s creates for the viewer the opportunity to speculate on the intentions of both. To enter beyond the surface, to place both bodies on display within an historical understanding of horror, infertility, and isolation, providing not only a window but an embroidered curtain as well. Both works draw an obvious line between the perceived neutrality of the camera and the poetic expression of the consciousness behind it.
This exhibition offers the viewer a broader context than images alone. Through interviews, videos, and links to external resources we have attempted to create a platform from which to see and understand the imaginary.
© Rui G. Cepeda. Roberto Muffoletto 2012