Measure of the World Through Camera Lens

The exhibit’s title sounds scholarly: Registration as an Act of Creation. It opened at the PA Gallery. The first thing about the exposition that may interest our devotees of actual art is its well-planned principled conceptuality. It is a collection of Polish artists from Krakow’s New Media Photography Group operating under the auspices of the Polish Artists’ Union. The group unites artists rather than photographers. They use photography and other media technologies to create their own special images, often reaching far outside the purely “photographic” manner. This may be an obvious documentation of a certain performance, as in the works of Bozena Buzin-Chawinska, or metaphysical and not to be equivocally deciphered, as in the photos of Krescenta Glazik or Peter Sneider. Gregor Banaszkiewicz carefully portrays metal symbols imbedded in the wall or sidewalk or pavement, like Warning! No digging! Underground Cable! Or ancient sewer hatch covers. Through these he conveys the rhythm of the urban landscape. Margarita Szidlowska in her mannerist, almost baroque photo studies enables the viewer to see Shakespearean grandeur and pathos. Pawel Chawinski portrays stones, rough and powerful facture, which amazingly turns out to be human. Zbigniew Belawka, in turn, portrays his contemporaries, striving not so much to catch their passing moods as stop time in its tracks for the person he trains his camera on, so his photos are close to mise en scenes or movie scenes. Iryna Kalenyk, the only Ukrainian participant in the exposition, offers soft daguerreotype collages, lending the display its required lyrical overtone. Practically every participant in the Registration as an Act of Creation is interesting in his/her own way. And there is one denominator for all these diverse works: they offer the viewer an original, albeit profoundly subjective, depiction of things, the author’s own measure of the world, beautiful in its own way.