Stefania Gurdowa. NEGATIVES ARE TO BE STORED

www.gurdowa.pl

In 1997 at the attic of a tenement-house in the town of Debica (Poland), there were discovered over a thousand of damaged glass negative plates. Most of them depicted expressive portraits of anonymous individuals living in the neighborhood in the 20's and 30's.

One could tell hardly anything about an author of the plates at the first look, although there was her name on them. Yet our deepened research shed more light upon the person which appeared to be unusual: an independent, consequent, gifted woman whose workshop remained far away from grand cultural capitols and who performed her art while taking ordered portraits of her neighbors: shopkeepers, craftsmen, peasants, priests and Jews.

Stefania Gurdowa of the maiden name Czerny was born in Bochnia, 1888. Her father was a bandmaster of a salt mine orchestra. She herself played a zither. She obtained her education as a photographer in Bochnia and than in Lwow (Lemberg). In 1921-1937 she run a photographic workshop on her own, in Debica (establishing branches in Mielec and Ropczyce for a certain time). It was not obvious for a woman to perform this craft at her times, whereas Gurdowa was apparently hiring a number of employees - with Feliks Adam Czelny among them, the man who later became famous after 1945, after he had prepared a documentation of the ruined Wroclaw. Stefania and Kazimierz Gurda divorced. From her home in Debica the photographer took only her daughter Zosia - and the piano. In the late 30. she settled in Silesia. Under the Nazi occupation she found herself as a mercenary worker in her own workshop, taken by the Germans. After the war had been over, the daughter Zosia migrated to France. However Stefania Gurdowa decided to remain and for one more time in her lifetime she started from the very beginning. It was in Lodygowice near Zywiec for this time. She was taking care of her granddaughter Basia for some years, until the girl reunited with her mother in France. And she obviously established another photographic workshop. Her former clients can very well remember that there always were fresh flowers in her rented chilly flat-and-atelier, as well as... a permanent Christmas-tree.

Gurdowa, the distinguished artist, died in 1968. The flat was cleaned after she had passed. The immense photographic archive was disposed and wasted. Only a fracture of her art lasted, together with a question without an answer: who hid a collection of glass plates behind a wall in the attic of her workshop in Debica? Perhaps was it her own decision to preserve them this way. As a responsible professional she must have obviously been aware of the rule that "negatives are to be stored".

Double portraits © Stefania Gurdowa

THE EXHIBITION

The exhibition organized within the framework of the Photomonth in Krakow 2008 is the return to our culture - kept in pieces - of the work of an outstanding artist. On most of the negatives saved there are two images next to each other. This operation, probably resulting from a need to save on materials, as well as the lighting used, makes the portraits look shockingly contemporary. Out from the intense, almost hypnotic photographs faces - the reflection of the interwar period - look at us and tell us about ourselves.

"Stefania Gurdowa. Negatives are to be stored" exhibition/Photomonth in Krakow 2008 - Kupa Kupa Synagogue © Michał Łuczak

Curators:

Agnieszka Sabor - Polish Studies graduate and art historian. She has been interested in the reception of art in Nazi and Communist propaganda. She is an editor at "Tygodnik Powszechny", where she deals with Jewish issues and art criticism.

Andrzej Kramarz - graduated from Institute of Creative Photography in Opawa. Since the early 90s he has been working in documentary photography publishing his works in the majority of Polish weeklies. His best known photographic cycles include: Black Sea, Clinic, the Infinity of Acquaintance and Home (together with Weronika Łodzińska). Winner of many photographic prizes. Co-founder of the Imago Mundi Foundation, artistic vice-director of Photomonth in Kraków, member of the Visavis.pl Photographers' Collective, lecturer at the Academy of Photography in Kraków.

The project was made possible thanks to funding from the Malopolska Region and Ministry of Culture and National Heritage