Jacek Dehnel

Photoplasticon

In "Photoplasticon" Jacek Dehnel practises the art of ekphrasis, which means describing works of art in words. The works of art in question are old photographs or postcards from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though there are also a few taken after the Second World War. Dehnel arranges the pictures in pairs, related by theme, in order to create a stereoscopic effect, like in a real photoplasticon. But what exactly is the purpose of the descriptions that accompany the reproduced photographs?
Ekphrasis is a singular art, at first glance rather unnecessary – why on earth describe what we can see anyway? But the person using the words must by necessity assume the role of an interpreter of the scene, someone who steps outside the frame of the picture, reconstructs the context and, to the single moment in the lives of people and objects that the camera has recorded, adds their earlier and later history. The observer also becomes a sociologist and psychologist, trying to fathom what motivated the pose and behaviour of the people being photographed, and reconstructing the social environment they lived in and that shaped their image. He also considers and describes what isn’t in the picture, or what appears in it indirectly, like the hidden revolver in Antonioni’s "Blow-Up". He deciphers the messages written on the backs of the photos and also carefully reads the contexts of a different kind created by the background the photographers have arranged, and against which the characters appear.
Dehnel is fascinated by what is past and gone; this fascination is at the root of the extremely rich vocabulary he uses to describe the objects that appear in the photographs. But there is also another reason why the picture described in words becomes something more than the original: the photograph captures people and things in their individual, unique nature – while words by necessity generalise, synthesise, and fit objects into an “image of the era”. Thus Dehnel’s book is not just a description of some photographs, but also an emotional attempt to read the past; its main character is time as an extra dimension that is only added to our perception of the pictures by the descriptions, which lend them a historical context and bitter awareness of approaching events, of which the people being photographed still had no idea at the moment when the magnesium flashed and the shutter fell.

Jerzy Jarzębski

Jacek Dehnel (born 1980) is a poet, translator, novelist and painter. In 2008 the German translation of his novel Lala was published, and more translations are under way, into Hebrew, Slovak, Hungarian, Italian, Croat and Lithuanian.