A Wider Field of View

The “A Wider Field of View” is a mosaic exhibition. The oldest works on display date from the 17th century, while the most recent were made in 1976. Among them are rarely shown images from the collection of the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, photographs by pivotal artists in the history of Polish photography, such as Karol Beyer, Walery Rzewuski and Konrad Brandel. The exhibition will also include a valuable daguerreotype from the second half of the 19th century. The juxtaposition of photography with painting and graphic art presented at the exhibition makes it possible to follow the motifs that have often been revived in art, as well as the ways in which reality was perceived.

Photographs have always had an enormous sentimental value, which allowed them to become a tool for dealing with transience and nostalgia. They also evoked fear—it was believed that the faces on the first daguerreotypes were capable of seeing. Even today, the images of the depicted figures are not indifferent for us. They arouse curiosity, prompting hypotheses as to the identity and fate of the people immortalised by the camera.

The exhibition emphasises that photography is a heterogeneous medium that makes use of various conventions and ways of depicting the photographed objects. Thus, alongside experimental and amateur photography, we see stylized photographs that borrow from painting a rigid way of posing. Cities, streets, and scenes of leisure time captured and documented in the frames become for us not only a source of historical knowledge, but also reveal how the person behind the lens is looking at the world around by showing what was important for them at that time.

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