I only do what I like.
st. Szyperska 3
(Bękarty design office)
Exhibition duration: June 2-25
Author’s guided tour on June 14 and 23, 5-7 pm.
Curator of the exhibition: Przemysław Jędrowski
For decades, the purpose of photography has been to capture the image of reality. Easier than painting, a democratic medium, it quickly became a tool proving the existence of everything: a city, a landscape, a human being, an encounter. Treacherously fast and incomprehensible in essence, the photogram was also identified with taking away the image, stealing and even imprisoning the soul of the photographed person. This tension between understanding, confirming and receiving and preparing the image has also become the essence of the work of photographers looking for their own forms of expression. One of them is Jerzy Sadowski, the author of the photographic series “On the Image” – 265 portraits, created since July 2018.
Sadowski’s cycle is a record of his fascination with people, their personalities, dissimilarity and similarity at the same time. It is also an apotheosis of classic analog photography and a tribute to the photographic craft. Made with a conscious use of the unpredictability of the entire process: from filming, through lens settings, lighting, the appearance of the model, to the process of developing the negative and printing.
Each of the portraits was taken with the Mamiya RB 67 medium frame camera. And this is the only technical constant of the project. The rest of the process is different lens settings causing blurring, changing the sensitivity of the films used from 100 to 1600 ISO, developing the negative and finally printing on a variety of papers. The result is a different contrast, color characteristics and perception of the whole work. Equally important is the fact that each person sat in front of the camera ready for a mimetic image of themselves, created in the image and likeness. So the hair was arranged, the clothes were carefully chosen, and the make-up was impeccable.
“On the image” shows us again and again how little we see. And although we can recognize ourselves in Sadowski’s photographs or identify people we know, we realize how blurred our perception of everything is, and thus our understanding of the world. Or is it just the opposite? The artist visualizes what is most important, invisible at first glance, reaching the essence of every human being. Perhaps what we see is the essence, the immortal ectoplasm?
Przemyslaw Jedrowski
Photography makes us understand that we will get to know the world if we accept it as it appears through the lens. But this is the opposite of cognition. For knowledge begins with not accepting the world as it appears. All possibility of knowing comes from the ability to say no. Strictly speaking, we’ll never understand anything from photographs.
Susan Sontag “On Photography”, Karakter, Kraków 2012
