Objects

The black and white of Tadeusz Rolke’s photographs emphasise the atmosphere of emptiness and abandonment emanating from the yard of an old tenement house at Grodzka Street in Lublin. A thin layer of snow, plaster falling off in patches, and a huge gateway complete the stark expression of the work. Only the footprints visible in the snow patch remind us that people still live here. Tadeusz Rolke said about this photo: “For me, it is a place where people lived, were present, walked. And that is enough for me, because it is the Old Town in Lublin. As you know, Jews constituted a huge percentage of Lublin’s inhabitants, and this is a testimony to their existence for me. (…) But these are specific places, and that’s what interests me in terms of photography. I translate this reality, these selected places into the language of photography” (http://www.rosikonpress.com/wywiad_449/Tadeusz_Rolke.html, accessed 18 November 2020).

Renata Piątkowska