Lieux de mémoire, ikony, fotografie. Wpływ obrazów fotograficznych na pamięć zbiorową w Polsce – rekonesans
Lieux de mémoire , icons, photographs. The impact of photographic images on collective memory in Poland – reconnaissance

Summary/Abstract: The role of photography in the formative process of the Polish collective memoryremains relatively unknown. There are no detailed studies of the issue and the available data do not create a logically constructed set. Hence, one has to rely only on fragmented information. In analysing the role of photography in the collective memory, a particularattention has to be paid to the distinction used by Barbara Szacka between public and common memory. The first one includes references to history present in public messages, and the second one signifies what is really present in people’s minds. In both these spheres, a different kind of photography dominates; the photographs play different roles and are differently perceived. It can be analysed on the example of two, rather opposite, cases: private photographs and photographic icons. Private photographs are the pictures taken to commemorate the events from the lives of individuals and their relatives, documenting events, people, places etc. important for them. For the persons who collect them and for their relatives, they are souvenirs of the past while what is important is their material virtue.These are not only pictures but also objects possessing their own history. Private photographs link family memories with those of a nation. On the one hand, they introduce “a great history” into the family remembrance while on the other hand; they become a component of the collective memory of wider groups of society. The results of the surveys conducted between September and November of 2003 by Tomasz Ferenc and of interviews conducted by Joanna Bartuszek in the period of 1999–2002 in Little Poland and the Podkarpacie Regions show that private photographs constitute an important component of the family’s remembering. Similar conclusions may be drawn from analysis of the data collected during the studies of collective memory conducted in 2003 and 2009. The concept of a place of memory (lieux de mémoire), introduced into modern humanistic science by Pierre Nora is understood in many diversified ways. It can also be applied to photography. The significant examples are the so called photographic icons. These are those icons and not the depicted events which are reference points that the social attention focuses on. They have been selected because of their special features and the role they play in public debate. Even if they were created with an intention of being an objective registration, providing them with a status of icon was an act of giving them their meanings. In the Polish culture,there are only a few pictures with an iconic status. The condition to obtain such a status is a multiple exposition in mass-media and mass-media were regarded untrustworthy within the whole course of the Polish People’s Republic’s history. Different kinds of photography appear in the Polish collective memory and in various spheres of that memory; different is the way of their reading and – what is particularly important – different is a level of their reliability. The photographs lack legitimacy which is acquired by being incorporated into a scientific debate. One can observe rather an opposite process – compromising their documentary value in the public debate.Research on the impact of photography upon the collective memory requires a detailed specification of the subject and the methodology of the analysis. A different approach has to be used to photographs functioning in the common memory and a different one to the photographic icons existing in the public memory. Questions relating to photography have to become a constant element of the research questionnaires used while studying the collective memory of the Poles.

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