 | Wydawnictwo Literackie
Kraków 2002
© Janusz Anderman
123 x 197
296 pages
paperback
ISBN 83-08-03226-5
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Janusz AndermanPhotographs
About the author
Excerpt
God knows if photography was really such a great invention. It did emerge at a time when it was much needed: when humanity had become so engrossed in its familial, social and financial concerns that conventional memory was no longer able to answer such simple questions as who?, with whom?, how? and why?. And since we do not behave with self-restraint in any area of human endeavour, photography has also got out of hand. We photograph anything, anywhere, any time, the Japanese most notoriously so.
Janusz Anderman took the lonely fight upon himself to recover the original meaning of photography, namely as the simplest way to record something that was but is no longer for posterity. But there’s the catch: does it really no longer exist? For the task of photography is not only to show visually how it was. It should also help to reconstruct the circumstances in which the photo was taken. Why there and not somewhere else? Who was behind the lens and who was in front of it? What triggered the click? In what kind of world did we live then?
This is the story told in Anderman’s Photographs. But if anyone buys Photographs with the idea of viewing some snapshots, they will be severely disappointed. Anderman is a writer and describes Photographs rather than showing them.
The photos record not only the childhood, adolescence and maturity of the boy from Kielce who came to Cracow, joined the dissenting magazine Student and then moved to Warsaw, where he still lives. The book is also a colourful, hilarious and often sinister story of the People’s Poland, that now historical country where absurdity, censorship, queues and Polish-Russian friendship flourished.
Somewhere along the line the boy became a writer. Some of his books are still regarded as being among the best accounts of the gloomy gangsterism also known as real socialism. His characteristic style, combining naturalism with the grotesque (Anderman has the grizzly bear’s avid ear for all kinds of colloquialisms marking the speaker socially), sometimes provokes a twitch of horror, sometimes a burst of laughter.
I think this is Anderman’s best book so far. If I am wrong, you can cut me into pieces, but read it anyway. It’s worth your while.
Tadeusz Nyczek
Janusz Anderman (b. 1949), a cult writer of his generation, was active in the underground literary life in the late Communist period. He shows that the mental wounds inflicted by totalitarianism are difficult to treat and he has few equals in detecting their traces in contemporary Polish life.
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