The aim of this project was to show changes that occurred in the Polish fashion photography driven by economic, political and cultural factors. I had a pleasure and challenge to produce and supervise this exhibition from the very early stage of queries and archival searches through set design production up to the grand opening and promotion.
Time frame of the exhibition – from 1918, through the period of the Polish People’s Republic, to contemporary times – covers the interwar period, Stalinism, political “thaw” (with the famous ‘We want to be modern’), the 1968 Revolution, Gierek times, Solidarność carnival and the martial law, turbulent state transformation period of the 80s and 90s, and finally: inclusion of Poland in the global network of political, economic and cultural dependencies and correlations. Polish fashion evolved parallelly to all these events. The evolution was captured in photo shoots for fashion magazines, in advertisements, product catalogues of particular brands, private archives, and the ever-expanding Internet sources.
The IFF exhibition focuses on changes in ways of communicating with fashion recipients – customers – and attempts a reflection on the role of photography in the fashion industry throughout the years. The project encourages anthropological contemplation on the role of media: their size (from a small catalogue, through a billboard, to a phone screen), quality (from locally printed papers to international fashion industry), and reach (private archives vs global campaigns).
It also shows differences between images created with first, very hard to get, cameras utilised in the reality of the Polish People’s Republic and its centralized market, and a free-market economy – the many years of rebuilding Poland and the first wave of amazement with the capitalist system, between the period of “full-time contract photographers” and democratisation of times when “we are all photographers”.
Exhibition curators: Aleksandra Jatczak-Repeć, Michał Suchora
photo: Michał Dyjuk