“The things happening in culture at the moment are surely a complex problem, and it could rather take a book not a letter to analyse. But a couple of days ago I saw a documentary about snakes. They shed their skin. This is what we are doing. I get the impression that the old one is unacceptable and the new one is emerging, so to speak, and we are just not able to think about it, to feel that we’re inside it”. The photography theorist Jerzy Busza wrote these thoughts in a letter to Andrzej Wrzesień in 1989.
From shows to theatre
Andrzej Wrzesień is one of the most prominent Polish commercial photographers whose professional success aligned with the transformation period in Poland – which took place from the 1980s through to the early nineties, which is the period Jerzy Busza referred to – a period during which Polish culture, including fashion and photography, radically changed its image. The history of Polish advertising photography and fashion is a hardly notable field of critical and scientific thought in Poland. It is occasionally a theme of exhibitions, such as the current exhibition by Zbigniew Wołyński at the National Museum in Gdańsk or a collective exhibition which took place several years ago at the Fort Fotografii gallery in Warsaw, curated by Aleksandra Jatczak. And yet, through its local social and historical circumstances, the history of Polish fashion photography is an intriguing topic.
Andrzej Wrzesień, photographing for major Polish companies since the 1980s, and later for privately-owned clothing and textile enterprises, has earned a notable place in this history. He was dealing with basically all spheres of fashion photography. He was the author of both original photo shoots for magazines (“Moda”, “Moda Top”, “Świat mody”, “Kino”, “Kobieta i życie”) and catalogues, but also of reports from fashion shows and look books, called “trade” photographs at the time. He portrayed famous actors, directors, designers, artists and all types of creative people who were inventing the spirit of the epoch. He paved the way for various types of media for advertising fashion photography, such as company calendars, folders, or image-building publications. If we treat fashion photography as not only product photography, but also as the photography of the spirit of the times, documenting a peculiar style, Wrzesień’s archives will not disappoint you in this respect either. It includes, for instance, a documentation of plays staged at the Jaracz Theatre in Łódź, an iconic place back in the 1980s (including plays directed by Falk, Grabowski and Gruza).
Turmoil in fashion photography
Most of all he worked as a fashion photographer. Hailed as the “court photographer of Telimena”, he was responsible for the advertisements of major Polish establishments and later of such brands as Pabia, Próchnik, Telimena, Skórimpex, Modena and many others which emerged on the rising tide of the Polish fashion market at the turn of the 20th and 21st century.
The current exhibition entitled “The 80s: Fashion Design and Graphics in France” at the Paris-based Museum of Decorative Arts (Musée des Arts Décoratifs) shows just how creative and innovative the 1980s were in fashion and design (the exhibition is open until 16 April 2023). In the history of world fashion photography, it is a period during which such creators as Sarah Moon, Peter Lindbergh and Patrick Demarchelier, who are currently seen as iconic names in photography, set the tone. Guy Bourdin and Janloup Sieff had been active for over a decade at the time. Advertising photography was competing against television, limiting the narrative nature and literal meaning of image, and returning to surreal associations and bold visual experiments. Progressive magazines, such as “International Mode” or “Depeche Mode” emerged, revolutionising the photographic depiction of fashion. There were numerous underground phenomena which entered the mainstream, introducing fresh ideas.
A freelancer in communist Poland
In Poland, however, it is a grim period of Martial Law with shortages on store shelves, censorship, poor quality printing and nearly guild-like rationed access to the profession of ‘photographer’. In these circumstances Andrzej Wrzesień graduated from the Direction of Photography Department at the Łódź Film School (which was, as he said himself, an intellectual, artistic and technical island on the map of the Polish People’s Republic) and entered the job market with enthusiasm.
The first and main obstacle was a clash with the system. The communist organisation of the distribution of ideas, including information about trends and fashion (called “light industry products” back then), conditioned the market activities of artistic freelancers on their affiliation with the artists’ or photographers’ union. If a clothing enterprise (today we would use the word ‘brand’) needed advertising photographs or pictures of products for a catalogue, they were unable to independently find a photographer willing to accept the task. The service could only be ordered via the union of plastic artists or photographers, which not only appointed a person to perform a given task from among its members but also specified the price and charged its commission (up to 40%) for every order on a top-down basis. The assumption was that artists’ unions would be able to put in place their own vision of art for industry, but in fact they were disconnected from the real market needs and global trends in commerce and advertising. This was not the way for such an independent and autonomous creator as Wrzesień, ready to cooperate with the fashion market in a commercial and capitalist way.
He spoke about this period in one of his interviews: “I enjoy working on my own the most, because I know that I can rely on myself. My equipment and my amenities, although not perfect but mine, namely my camera, my darkroom, my enlarger, gave me the certainty of what I can expect and what I can achieve with such tools. Although everyone could take photos in communist Poland, not everyone could sell them. During the third year of my degree programme, I showed my works to the doyen of Polish photography, Prof. Zbigniew Pękosławski, and he told me to submit my works to the committee, and that is how I got a ministerial certificate confirming that I was a “photography artist.” This allowed me to pursue a career as a photographer in communist Poland, sell my works and make a living.” The doyen of Polish photography was so impressed by Wrzesień’s works that he was given the certificate for as many as 5 years. It had to be renewed on a regular basis, but the standard validity period of such certificates was 1 year. For Wrzesień, it was a pass to work in the profession as a freelancer, similarly to the activities of Western photographers.
A breath of fresh air in Telimena
Telimena Fashion House became Wrzesień’s first customer. Thanks to the recommendation from Professor Jan Finkstein, the then Dean at the Łódź Higher School of Plastic Arts (currently the Academy of Fine Arts) and later the editor of a progressive magazine devoted to fashion trends called “Kierunki”, Wrzesień’s creative work reached Zofia Sprudin, the legendary art director of Telimena, who was searching for opportunities to “renew” her creative team. She was looking for a breath of new, contemporary life in design and photographs. She had already hired young designers, Mirosław Szczepaniak and Ewa Robak. A young photographer was another addition to the team.
Let’s find out what Wrzesień himself said about it: “Zofia Sprudin invited me to come to a photo shoot. I was a fourth-year student at the time, and had already seen a lot of various photographs and magazines I had access to at the Film School. In the most revolutionary fashion magazine of the time, the girls on the cover were posing with live fish in their mouths, and there I was at a photo shoot where a model was asked to move her pinkie finger to the left. After the shoot, Zofia asked me about my opinion. I was honest and replied that I felt that it should have been done completely differently. This is when I was offered to take my first photos for Telimena, and those were photos from a fashion show. Only three companies in Poland were organising such shows at the time – Moda Polska, Telimena and Woolmark. After the fashion show, I was given the opportunity to do a “real” photo shoot. Enterprises would hire photographers, but they were regular photographers who run their establishments, provided services to the general public, and prepared photo shoots for business entities “occasionally”. I had to prove that my photos were better to make them willing to hire me.”
In all his projects, Wrzesień kept fighting for the best possible quality of photographs in times when the quality of advertising in Poland was far from perfect, due to system-related shortages like in the 1980s or owing to people relishing the first wave of aggressive capitalism in early 1990s. When asked about the source of his enthusiasm and persistence in unfavourable circumstances, he would say: “It was my profession. I was a photographer. I wanted to take good photos,” and “I come from the world of film and it is natural to me that if you want to make something, you need to create it. It was our drive: the greater the resistance, the more we wanted to change things.”
The world of film has brought not only the passion for creating the photographed reality, but also the technical ability to operate light, and most of all the search for a story behind the image on a fashion photograph, a seeming randomness of looking at a model, selective focus in the picture, or utilising unlikely sets for photography shoots. He was influenced by photographers such as Guy Bourdin, Sarah Moon, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, and Peter Lindbergh.
The 1990s – Vrzesień Studio
Together with the changes taking place in the fashion and textile industry after 1989 in Poland (privatisation of the sector, private production and trading boom, full bloom of trade fairs, shows and presentations) and later on, in the second half of the 1990s (economic reforms, changes to the existing export markets), the face of Polish fashion photography was transformed. Advertising was developing, and new photography media were emerging. The existing printed forms were accompanied by advertising campaigns designed in a completely new way. The magazine market was growing, ranging from high-volume popular magazines to a number of industry publications. Finally, the Internet arrived in the late 1990s, as a fledgling new information and advertising space.
In the early 1990s, Wrzesień went with the flow and established an advertising agency called Vrzesień Studio, specialising in services for the fashion sector, existing companies and proliferating new private enterprises which needed support in finding their place on the market. The agency employed models, stylists and graphic designers. In addition to photo shoots, they were dealing with developing advertising and image-building campaigns. To advertise Lasocki shoes, they organised a photo shoot with the members of De Mono band, who were hitting the charts at the time. They also took photographs for the packaging of new products, for example Familijne ice cream, Mentos or Frutella sweets. For Próchnik, Pabia and Pierre Cardin, some of the first on-location shoots in exotic countries (Canary Islands, Tunisia) were organised for the Polish market. In 1998, Wrzesień registered generic domains with NASK: wedding.pl, jeans.pl, shoes.pl and introduced the Polish fashion sector to the Internet. The first websites of Polish designers and brands were created in these domains. After that, he launched the first information portal in Poland dedicated to fashion, moda.com.pl, and its activities were appreciated by specialist association members and honoured with the most important prizes of the decade: Honorowa Złota Nitka (Golden Thread of Merit), Acanthus Aureus and the Izadora statue.
The salient feature of Andrzej Wrzesień’s photography is his response to trends. He is perhaps the only Polish fashion photographer of the time who was aware of how the trends emerged and he was ready to use this knowledge in his work. He talks about it in his interviews. He is not interested in illustrative photography where only models’ faces and outfits change. He is searching form the visual demonstration of style, the spirit of the season: the leitmotif expressed in the collection. He is constantly searching for new methods of image depiction. Just like the designer’s objective is to make the “street” buy his clothing, Wrzesień is focused on making the “recipients” buy the way he perceives the world. This vivid dialogue with the recipients, taking place and being verified regularly in magazines printed in the thousands of copies, is the driving force of his work. For that reason, his fashion photographs from early 1980s differ in atmosphere and style from the ones taken in late 1980s, and these in turn are distinct from the later ones taken throughout the 1990s. When watched after several dozen years, they are not only documents of Polish fashion of the time, but most of all of the way it was perceived. A good fashion photographer not only illustrates it, but is also its co-creator.
Written by Natalia Barbarska
