<p>Izabela Pluta, <em>An over air pursuit of likeness (formation study 1-7)</em><span>, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.</span></p>
<p>Izabela Pluta, <em>An over air pursuit of likeness (formation study 1-7)</em><span>, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.</span></p>

No. 41: Photoalbums

Managing editors: Katarzyna Bojarska, Katarzyna Adamska, Monika Michałowicz

Izabela Pluta, An over air pursuit of likeness (formation study 1-7), 2021. Courtesy of the artist.

This issue was prepared in cooperation with the Photography Centre of the Museum of the City of Warsaw. This issue was supported by the SWPS University, Warsaw, University of Warsaw, and the program of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage from Culture Promotion Fund - State Purpose Fund.

Table of Contents

Introduction

  1. Photoalbums

    ”Photoalbums”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 41 (2025), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/41-photoalbums/photoalbums

    Introduction to the issue devoted to photographic albums.

    keywords: photographic albums; exhibition; photography; memory; materiality; gesture

Viewpoint

  1. Every even page from a nineteenth century photo album

    Izabela Pluta
    Izabela Pluta, ”Every even page from a nineteenth century photo album”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 41 (2025), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/41-photoalbums/every-even-page-from-a-nineteenth-century-photo-album

    Presentation of Izabela Pluta's project, Every even page from a nineteenth century photo album, 2013

    Series of 21 pigment prints on photo rag, 30.5 x 38 cm each

    keywords: temporal distance; spatial logic; artistic research; photography and memory; displacement; materiality

  2. Temporal Distance, Spatial Logic: Photography’s Relationship to Memory

    Izabela Pluta
    Izabela Pluta, ”Temporal Distance, Spatial Logic”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 41 (2025), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/41-photoalbums/temporal-distance-spatial-logic

    In her essay, Izabela Pluta examines how temporal distance and spatial logic intersect in artistic practice through artistic research, focusing on photography’s role in shaping memory and experience. Departing from her biographical experience, and taking a number of her own projects as case studies, the artist reflects on practices such as gleaning or collage as ways of envisioning reflexive artistic objects and gestures. deconstructing the photoalbum as choreography of glances in the process. Ultimately Pluta talks about her preoccupation with fragmentation and reassembly and the importance of art as embodied encounter for her work, allowing to think about the contingency of meaning.

    keywords: temporal distance; spatial logic; artistic research; photography and memory; displacement; materiality

  3. Israel „Julek” Gombiński’s Album

    Julius (Julek) Gombin (Gombiński)
    Julius (Julek) Gombin (Gombiński), ”Israel „Julek” Gombiński’s Album”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 41 (2025), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/41-photoalbums/israel-julek-gombinskis-album

    Presentation of  Israel “Julek” Gombiński’s photoalbum, unpacked and narrated as part of Olga Stanisławska’s project, Scheda (Something in Common).

  4. Julek’s Album

    Olga Stanisławska
    Olga Stanisławska, ”Julek’s Album”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 41 (2025), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/41-photoalbums/album-gombinskiego

    This is part of the Scheda (Something in Common) project, launched in 2007 to record the oral history of Sompolno, where the author's father was born, grew up, and spent the war. It is a rescue project, with questions about the future and the possibility of care at stake. The project consists of the last stories of former residents of Sompolno, Polish Jews, ethnic Poles, and descendants of German colonists. The turning point is 1947, which marks the end of the town's multiculturalism and the end of the anti-communist underground operating there. These stories are a battlefield and a space for understanding. They continually reestablish a country, a phantasmal country in which we partly live. Those of us in Sompolno, Łódź, Warsaw, Jerusalem, near Munich, or New York have listened to these or similar stories, or to the silence. The project was supported by a grant from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.

    keywords: fotografia; album; Zagłada; Holocaust; Żydzi; Polska; międzywojnie

Perspectives

  1. The Albums of Rosemarie Lincke, a DRK Nurse

    Katarzyna Adamska
    Katarzyna Adamska, ”The Albums of Rosemarie Lincke, a DRK Nurse”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 41 (2025), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/41-photoalbums/kopia-albumy-rosemarie-lincke-sanitariuszki-drk

    The text discusses two photo albums by Rosemarie Lincke (1917–2001), a German Red Cross nurse stationed in Warsaw during World War II. She created them at the end of the war or after it had ended, creating a photographic narrative about a journey that was crucial in her life and about Warsaw as she saw it. The albums contain photos of everyday life in hospitals, and also views of the gradually annihilated ghetto. For those viewing them today, they are a problematic testimony. The text proposes reading them in parallel with the preserved negatives and letters. This analysis allows to add to the nurse’s story questions about categories of seeing and two simultaneously present identities: Rosemarie and the future Mrs. Lincke, the fiancée of an SS man she met in Warsaw.

    keywords: Rosemarie Lincke; photography of the Holocaust; photo album; amateur photographer; spectatress; formative trip

  2. An Album of Scenes from Rural Life? Marcin Olszyński’s Photographs from Starogród (1856)

    Ewa Nowak-Mitura
    Ewa Nowak-Mitura, ”An Album of Scenes from Rural Life?”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 41 (2025), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/41-photoalbums/an-album-of-scenes-from-rural-life

    The text discusses a photographic series by Marcin Olszyński, taken in 1856 in the village of Starogród near Warsaw. It attempts to reconstruct the circumstances under which the photographs were created and to reassemble the series based on surviving images, manuscripts, and press articles. The text includes reflections on the 19th-century understanding of the term “photographic album” and the practices surrounding its use, placing Olszyński’s series in a new light. It offers a reinterpretation by broadening the research perspective to include an analysis of Olszyński’s working methods, his relationships, and introduces the material context of the surviving prints as a source. It posits that Olszyński’s series is much more than only the first Polish ethnographic photography, but also, in a broader context, a multidimensional narrative—and above all, a fascinating and innovative project that marked a turning point in the career of the young amateur.

    keywords: Marcin Olszyński; amateur photographer; photographic album; photography; 19th century; Starogród; Karol Beyer; Marek Ptasiński

  3. From the Factory Director’s Perspective

    Julia Staniszewska
    Julia Staniszewska, ”From the Factory Director’s Perspective”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 41 (2025), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/41-photoalbums/from-the-factory-directors-perspective

    The text discusses the album of Stefan Stattler, an employee and technical director of the “Lilpop, Rau i Loewenstein” factory from 1872 to 1912. The album presents the story of the company’s growth and success; however, on its final page, Stattler compares himself to a draft horse. This emotional gesture radically changes the reception of the narrative and raises questions about the hidden protagonists of the album.

    keywords: Lilpop, Rau and Loewenstein factory; work; exploitation

  4. Stella: An Album of Self-Discovery

    Monika Michałowicz
    Monika Michałowicz, ”Stella: An Album of Self-Discovery”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 41 (2025), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/41-photoalbums/stella-an-album-of-self-discovery

    The author examines her experience of working with the archives of the Rolbieski and Szacherski families. She focuses on three photographic albums by Stella Szacherska (1911–1997), a historian, medievalist, archivist and translator: an album from an educational and formative trip to Cannes, which opens with a self-portrait in the mirror, legitimizing the idea of Stella as a person who consciously uses photography; an album documenting the first year of her daughter Maria Krystyna's life; and an album with photographs from her own childhood, which she probably made as an adult woman. The author ponders what role photography could have played in Stella's life and choices, and how she used it as a self-narrative tool.

    keywords: Stella Szacherska; family archive; photographic albums; motherhood; daughterhood; formative trip; auto-photo-biography

Close Up

  1. Constantly Unfolding and Consistently Present: The Active Life of Historical Photograph Albums

    Andrea Kunard
    Andrea Kunard, ”Constantly Unfolding and Consistently Present”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 41 (2025), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/41-photoalbums/constantly-unfolding-and-consistently-present

    This paper moves beyond consideration of the photograph as a singular image to explore its active life as an event that unfolds across multiple spaces and temporalities. As an imaginative, creative space, the photograph album is multisensorial. It is a site of tactility and orality that allows the assembler or album owner to articulate changing narratives. This function enfolds another sense, that of hearing or listening to the tales told and imaginatively engaging with them. The oral/auditory/visual/tactile aspect of the album, which operates as a reflective, interior, evocative space, also opens to a public and shared space through performance and other creative means of expression. The photograph, through the actions of its taking, exchange, collection, and display in albums, enfolds viewers in real and imaginative communities, as a site of sharing and bonding.

    keywords: photograph albu; community; materiality; oral history; performative gesture

  2. Jo Spence: Radicalizing the Family Album

    Patrizia di Bello
    Patrizia di Bello, ”Jo Spence: Radicalizing the Family Album”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 41 (2025), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/41-photoalbums/jo-spence-radicalizing-the-family-album

    Photographer, educator, and writer on photography Jo Spence (London, UK, 1934–1992) worked on deconstructing and critiquing the family album, visually and textually, from the mid-1970s until the end of her life. In many ways, her whole oeuvre could be seen as one big, multi-layered, “alternative” family album made not only for herself, but to share with others her insights into the potential of photography as a tool for personal and political change. She reworked existing family photographs and images from the media, and also made new ones, to visualize experiences that family albums don’t usually show – work and strife, domestic drudgery and illness, unhappiness and powerlessness, but also joyfully unruly bodies that do not conform to dominant standards of beauty. Inspired by the consciousness-raising practices of the feminist movement and by egalitarian co-counselling techniques, she developed “photo therapy” across several projects in collaboration with Rosy Martin and others, to demonstrate the importance of understanding the power of images over us. This article analyses some of her work under the rubric of the “album” to highlight the continuing relevance of its lessons.

    keywords: Jo Spence; family album; photographer; feminist; family photography; herstory; women's body

  3. Foreign, but Homely: What Can Be Gained from Studying Family Vacation Albums?

    Mette Sandbye
    Mette Sandbye, ”Foreign, but Homely”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 41 (2025), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/41-photoalbums/foreign-but-homely

    The phenomenon of charter tourism is a recent and still relatively understudied historical subject related to the post-WWII welfare society, particularly in Northern and Western Europe, In cultural geography and sociology there has been increasing interest in tourism studies, but few studies on ordinary people’s vacation photo albums. With such material as an analytical prism, exemplified by close readings of Danish and British private vacation photo albums from the early 1970s, this contribution includes a discussion on methodology: how can one, using tools from the field of aesthetical analysis in combination with a wider range of cultural studies theories, analyze such non-canonized, personal, everyday material in a broader cultural-historical context and make it mean something on its own terms and beyond the personal? The article challenges conventional binaries – tourist/local, home/away, representation/performance – and the author concludes that making vacation photo albums can be considered an aesthetic tool with which to inhabit, familiarize, perform, and experience a place.

    keywords: Vacation albums; charter holidays; family photography; aesthetic practices of everyday life; cultural studies

  4. Re-envisioning African American Motherhood in Two Nineteenth-Century Women's Photographic Albums

    Mary Trent
    Mary Trent, ”Re-envisioning African American Motherhood”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 41 (2025), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/41-photoalbums/re-envisioning-african-american-motherhood

    The article examines how nineteenth-century African American women used photographic albums to re-envision Black motherhood, challenging dominant stereotypes and establishing narratives of family, respectability, and social connection. Focusing on the albums of Ellen Craft – a formerly enslaved woman and abolitionist – and Arabella Chapman – a freeborn, middle-class educator – the essay explores how these mothers curated images of family, friends, and prominent public figures to document kinship ties and social networks that reflect financial stability and middle-class values. These visual choices directly counteract racist caricatures of Black mothers as unfit, instead portraying them as dignified matriarchs and community builders. The albums also serve as intergenerational records, with daughters and granddaughters adding their own images and notations, thereby preserving and honoring maternal legacies. The discovery of photographs shared between their albums enlightens a previously unknown familial connection between Craft and Chapman, illustrating how photographic albums not only recorded but also maintained bonds. By situating these albums within broader photographic and social history, the article demonstrates that African American mothers’ album-making was a powerful act of resistance and self-definition. Ultimately, these albums are shown to be living documents that offered affirmative visions of Black motherhood across generations, countering historical narratives of disempowerment, degradation, and loss.

    keywords: nineteenth-century photography; African American women; photographic albums; Black motherhood; challenging dominant stereotypes; narratives of family

  5. Family Touches

    Tina Campt
    Tina Campt, ”Family Touches”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 41 (2025), https://www.pismowidok.org/pl/archiwum/41-fotoalbumy/dotkniecia-rodziny

    Polish translation of chapter one of Tina Campt's influential book, Image Matters (Duke University Press 2012) that traces the emergence of a black European subject by examining how specific black European communities used family photography to create forms of identification and community. The authors studies two photographic archives, one composed primarily of snapshots of black German families taken between 1900 and 1945. She shows how these photographs conveyed profound aspirations to forms of national and cultural belonging. Image Matters is an extraordinary reflection on what vernacular photography enabled black Europeans to say about themselves and their communities.

    keywords: family; album; photography; Blackness; diaspora; memory; image; Black subject

Snapshots

  1. Pessimism Full of Faith

    Mikołaj Bojnarowicz
    Mikołaj Bojnarowicz, ”Pessimism Full of Faith”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 41 (2025), https://www.pismowidok.org/pl/archiwum/41-fotoalbumy/pesymizm-pelen-wiary

    This article is a review of Corsair Interviews by Pier Paolo Pasolini, interpreting his thought as an attempt to go beyond the horizon of late capitalism. Pasolini is portrayed as a leftist theorist who sees fascism as a tool of capitalism—a culturally embedded form of violence used to sustain its reproduction and dominance.

    keywords: Pasolini; late capitalism; fascism; ideology; Marxism

  2. Chopin, Mentzen and Engineer Karwowski. On Polish masculinity

    Marta Gospodarczyk
    Marta Gospodarczyk, ”Chopin, Mentzen and Engineer Karwowski”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 41 (2025), https://www.pismowidok.org/pl/archiwum/41-fotoalbumy/chopin-mentzen-i-inzynier-karwowski

    The article takes a critical look at Wojciech Śmieja’s book Po męstwie (2024), situating it in the context of the existing body of work on masculinities in Poland. The article reconstructs the main arguments of the book, including the changes in dominant cultural patterns and images constructing Polish masculinities between the end of 19th century to contemporary times, placing an emphasis on the ties between categories of nation and masculinity. The last part of the article is devoted to a further contextualization of the conceptualizations of “the end of masculinities”, as proposed by Śmieja.

    keywords: Po męstwie; masculinities; Poland; transformation