Agnieszka Traczewska has been creating photographs of Hasidim for over a dozen years and organising them into subsequent series. Her interest has developed into years of experience learning about Orthodox Jewish communities, their history and traditions, and the principles and values that guide them. Essential to this process was building the trust that the Hasidic communities had to place in the artist to allow her to document their world. Her interest stemmed from curiosity sparked by the groups of people regularly seen in Kraków dressed in distinctive costumes. The artist recalls that despite the extremely rich centuries-long Jewish history, including Hasidic history, of the town in which she grew up, her education was completely silent on these themes. Thanks to a long and in-depth process of getting to know the Orthodox milieu and penetrating it, it became possible for her to do what Professor Marcin Wodziński, an outstanding historian and expert on Hasidism, aptly described: "Agnieszka Traczewska is the author of a new canon of Hasidic photography".
Her first series is "Powroty" (Returns) (published as an album in 2018) – photographs of Hasidic Jews visiting the cities and towns where their families originated, especially the burial sites of tzadiks as holy places. Hasidim believe that the places where tzadiks live, and especially the areas around their burial places, are filled with spirituality – they renew their bond with it by visiting them, and it is their duty to do so at least once a year. The pilgrimage rule applies to men (although there is no ban for women), hence it is virtually only they who are present in Traczewska's photographs. The people captured in the frames by the photographer, all dressed identically and in a particular way, visit such places as Leżajsk, Lelów, Dynów or the big cities of Kraków, Katowice and Warsaw. They contrast with the local population and often arouse curiosity, despite the fact that barely a few decades ago they made up a large percentage of the population in these places. The photographs also document a broader dimension of the disappearance of memory about the community that occurred after the Holocaust.
The artist followed the trail of this community to the places where they now live – the United States, Canada, Israel, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom – and there she began to document the daily lives of Hasidic families. This has resulted in unique photographs, as there has been no in-depth, multi-faceted, truthful picture of the life of Orthodox Jewish communities until now, not least because of the hermetic nature of this environment. This required a long process of confidence-building on the part of the photographer to not only take the picture, but also to enter into a dialogue with the residents and capture their objective image, as she herself emphasises. This led to the series of photographs "A Rekindled World", a selection of which appeared in an album of the same title (2021), and in 2014 one of the photographs, "First Time", received the National Geographic Traveller Photo Award. Photographs from both series have been presented in numerous exhibitions in Poland and abroad.
The third and most difficult photographic challenge undertaken by Traczewska is "Chasydki" (Hasidic Women) – a series documenting the lives of women in Orthodox Jewish communities. The difficulty was primarily in obtaining consent for the subjects of the photos to be women – from themselves and from the community, in which publicly available photos and illustrations only feature girls under the age of six. Women in Hasidic families are guided by the principle of modesty (in Yiddish: tzniut) defined in their behaviour, clothes and social contacts: they are to pay no attention to themselves or their appearance, to be focused on domestic and family life and the birth and upbringing of numerous offspring. It was also a challenge in creating this series not to abuse the trust of the families who bestowed it on Traczewska and allowed her to make women and girls the protagonists of the photographs, despite their principles. The series was created in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which included a selection of 40 photographs in its collection. Małgorzata Bogdańska-Krzyżanek
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