Patrycja Orzechowska

The realm of phantoms will never be redeemed¹
Siegfried Kracauer

Responsibility before the ghosts of those
who are not yet born or who are already dead²
Jacques Derrida

The world of photography is peopled by spectres: the paradoxes and aporicity inherent in the very essence of the medium make it possible to commune with ghosts, to see them. Roland Barthes recognised this paradox—photography is a moment when “I am truly becoming a specter,”³ he wrote—as photography’s greatest secret, which continues to mystify us. Phantoms that appear in a photograph exist in a world “in-between,” which resembles a dream. In something akin to an afterworld, a purgatory whose inhabitants “will never be redeemed” (at least as long as our gaze rests on them).

There is actually nothing extraordinary in photography’s inclination towards the world of spectres, towards the dreamy non-logic. For it has always seemed to be an ideal medium to invoke spirits (“Photography is the only evidence of the optical realness of ghosts,”⁴ as Eduard von Hartmann wrote), to explore the subconscious, to explore what—paradoxically—early in 19th century photography, which, although we often attribute purely realist, veristic intentions to it, abounds in examples of using the photographic camera for the needs of investigating the suprarational, using it for purposes that might be defined as mystical, occult, spiritistic… The dream of scanning a human body and discovering its secrets, investigating and capturing the human soul, thoughts, moods, dreams, the desire to penetrate the “essence of things,” discover a secret order that regulates the world of objects, the key to understanding the connection between time and space: all those desires and expectations became part of photography, a peculiar consequence of the “scientific character,” attributed to it by contemporaries.

Examples? On 25 June 1896, Louis Darget situates a photographic plate above the forehead of sleeping Madame Darget—what was preserved on the film was beyond doubt a crystallisation of thought, its true image, as the French serviceman and inventor proclaimed. A luminous image or perhaps rather a record of chaotic movements of light: for Darget, thought had a luminous or phosphorescing character, it possessed a real aura which remained elusive for the naked eye, yet not for photography. In another photo-experiment, he attempted to use photosensitive material as a site of the materialisation of not so much thought but of emotion, or more specifically—anger: on 23 June 1896, he situated a plate above the forehead of an enraged person for ten minutes… More than a dozen years later, a Pole, Julian Ochorowicz, a figure completely forgotten today, carried out a “materialisation of an astral body”: a record of energy emitted by a medium (the mediums were Eusapia Palladino and Stanisława Tomczyk, famous at the turn of the century) without the use of the camera. Finally, August Strindberg, a renowned writer but also keen photographer whose experiments with photography coincided with his profound psychic crisis, carried out in the 1890s a series of the so-called ‘celestographies’—records of a starry sky created without the use of the camera and lens. “I expose a photographic plate facing towards Orion, without a camera, without a camera lens, with the light of the starry sky. The film reveals a surface merged with countless glowing points…,”⁵ he wrote. In all these experiments, pseudo-scientific convictions combine with extraordinary visual effects, and technology goes hand in hand with the logic of dreaming, generating poetic images whose meaning escapes us and remains a mystery.

Patrycja Orzechowska’s work Medium contains more of the world of 19th century photography, peopled by spectres and imbued with a spiritistic aura, than of the avant-garde formalism which her pieces seemingly refer to. There are also more mysteries than answers. The cycle of several dozen photograms show objects from the collection of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews—an embroidered tablecloth, a “Gypsy doll,” a signet ring of a death camp prisoner, ceramic tiles from the Praga synagogue and from a private apartment in Orla St., dreidels, cutlery, a hair curler, kippahs, a woman’s handbag, bullets found in the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto, soap, gloves, Star of David, the “attic” calendar of Celina Glücksberg who stayed in hiding. They all mark an essentially alchemical attempt to establish contact with the reality that is no more, an attempt to lend a new spectral life to objects that are dead in a double way: as relics of the pre-war and pre-March ’68 world of Polish Jews,, and as artefacts “put to death” by the museum, subjected to museification, hidden in immense storage spaces, meticulously described… The artist sets these objects and histories attached to them in motion, she brings them back to life—however paradoxical that life may be. The objects travel from the museum storage to the photographic darkroom, they change their “place of residence” for a short while; illuminated with the light from the enlarger (the light, which as Jerzy Lewczyński used to say, is always a witness in photography), they appear on the surface of the photographic paper as “same but different”: deformed, recognisable and unrecognisable at the same time, sometimes formless, immersed in dreamy transience, and at the same time so concrete… Dream, akin to poetry, is imbued with non-literality⁶—Orzechowska’s photograms are based on non-literality, they feature signs whose meaning continues to escape us, taking away our peace of mind. They require effort, which is not only a matter of careful looking, staring (sometimes futile), but which also confronts us with the fundamental question: what do we see? Things, objects non-identical to their very selves, their shadows, imprints on photosensitive paper: all of this compels the effort of understanding—the work which is always the most difficult and which begins the moment when our gaze becomes familiar with their form. In this sense, they act akin to poetry. In this sense, they are a mystery akin to figures and events that appear in dreams. At the same time, similarly to the photographic experiments pursued by Darget or Strindberg, they attempt to capture not so much the object itself—an artefact from the museum collection—but rather its aura, the energy that it emanates. What is this energy? Does it belong to the realm of light or of things? Or is it perhaps an emanation of a story attached to the object, its former owner? Or is it rather the aura of History? These questions remain unanswered.

At the same time, working in the darkroom becomes akin to a concealed performance, a seance of invoking spectres (does it not come close in a certain sense to the attempts made by Darget, Strindberg and Ochorowicz?), which is carried out, however, in a special place—in the space of the Museum, in the middle of the former Ghetto. In a space which is, on the one hand, as official and neutral as possible, while on the other hand—it is saturated with meanings, bears the burden of its collection, its history. The darkroom, built specifically for the needs of this project, becomes a mediator between these contradictions. At the same time, this most archetypal dimension of the darkroom process—so entangled in magical thinking about photography—concerns the meaning of the eponymous word “medium.” Who is the medium? The artist who invokes the phantoms of objects? The objects themselves, which “mediate” between their former owners and their today’s role as a testimony, a keepsake? The museum – a medium between the past and the future, between the difficult common memory of Jews and Poles? The photosensitive paper, the light itself—the media of the darkroom process? And finally, us, the viewers, who attempt to understand the sense of the shapes presented to us, attempt to link—mediatise—their form with our common Jewish-Polish history and its consequences for our contemporary life? This ambiguity, which offers the possibility to connect a plethora of different elements—museum, photography, spectres, history, materiality of things, and finally the artist herself and us as the viewers—the ambiguity that connects opposites generates a special kind of tension and exposes us to a certain kind of cognitive uncertainty.

It is difficult to resist the impression that what appears on the photosensitive paper reverses the idea of a museum collection in a perverse manner, creating a certain kind of its alternative vision, a different kind of presence, telling its story in a different way. For instead of testimonies, artefacts or keepsakes, we encounter spectres, shadows of museum objects deformed by the impact of light, the traces of their aura. Their phantom-like nature and “weakness” paradoxically lends them a presence—the more blurred and difficult to recognise they become, the stronger they exist, the more powerfully they speak to us. Yet, these often vague shapes compel us once again to ask about the people to whom they used to belong, about their common histories as well as about what has been left of them now, and about their today’s meaning. Or perhaps it is not the meaning as such that is at stake here, but ethical responsibility? As Jacques Derrida wrote in Specters of Marx:

If it—learning to live—remains to be done, it can happen only between life and death. (…) If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, nor presently living (…) it is in the name of justice. (…) responsibility before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppression of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism.⁷

Is it a matter of the artist’s responsibility? Perhaps the responsibility is ours: those who look and try to understand.