Witold Kanicki on the automotive industry in photorealism

The amateur and professional photographic practice of the Polish People’s Republic was significantly different from the photographic culture practiced on the western side of the Iron Curtain. Quantitative and qualitative differences also remind us of the gap between the car culture of the USA and Poland during the communist era. Yet cars appeared in the photos of Polish amateurs and artists of that time. Witold Kanicki’s lecture will focus on interesting cases of collisions between photography and motoring in the times of the Polish People’s Republic. Not without significance will turn out to be phenomena such as color photography, which was rarely practiced at that time, Polaroids or painting hyperrealism, which – despite political incorrectness – influenced the work of some Polish artists of the 1970s and 1980s.

Witold Kanicki (born 1979) is a doctor of art history, assistant professor at the Faculty of Artistic Education and Curating at the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of the Arts Poznań. In 2014-2020 he was a guest lecturer at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste in Zurich. He is an independent critic and curator, author of several dozen texts on art and photography, published, among others, in “Kwartalnik Fotografia”, “Artluk”, “Exit”. His doctoral dissertation was published by the publishing house Słowa/obraz terytoria under the title “The Negative Pole of Photography: Negative Images in Modern Art” in 2016. In March 2022, his book “Wacław Nowak: Polaroid – photography from import” was published (University of Arts in Poznań, Wolno Publishing House). Last year he published (together with Dorota Łuczak and Maciej Szymanowicz) an anthology of Polish texts devoted to photography (“Polish photographers, critics and theorists about photography, 1839-1989”, Poznań 2021). Currently, he continues research on the history of instant photography in Poland, with particular emphasis on the times of the Polish People’s Republic.

Admission to the meeting is free!