Tadeusz Rolke (b. 1929) is one of the most renowned Polish photographers, who gained fame with his fashion photographic, reportage shots of everyday life in the People’s Republic of Poland, and portraits of important figures of artistic life. “Rolke is also – as Adam Szymczyk commented – one of the most sensitive observers of a certain “gap in the landscape”, the emptiness of the exterminated community of Polish Jews, the traces of their presence-absence” (A. Szymczyk, “Planeta Rolke”. The photographer, asked why there were no people in those photos, replied without hesitation: “But these photos are taken for those who did live here. And that is why they are entitled “We Were Here” ”(G. Józefczuk, Kultura pamięci – rozmowa z Tadeuszem Rolke [Culture of Memory: an Interview with Tadeusz Rolke], 28 February 2009, https://lublin.wyborcza.pl/lublin/7,48724,6329200,kultura-pamieci-rozmowa-z-tadeuszem-rolke.html?disableRedirects=true, accessed 18 November 2020). He also added: “I had been interested in the history of Jews for a long time. As a photographer, I felt I had to address it. In 1990, on my way back from Lviv, I had to spend a few hours in Przemyśl. I went to a bookshop and bought the Tales of the Hasidim by Martin Buber. It was that instructive book that made me find myself, three years later, in the town of Bełz, where I took my first photographs. Soon after that, my friend Jerzy Budziszewski (Joshua Ben Or), an artist living in New York, convinced me of the necessity to photograph places related to the Hasidic history. This is why I look for these places, choose frames from their reality, avoiding contemporary attributes such as TV antennas, flaring advertisements, cars parked everywhere. There will be more such photos...” (G. Józefczuk, op. cit.).
The POLIN Museum holds five black-and-white photographs from the We Were Here series. Other can be seen on the website of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, in the Tadeusz Rolke Archive (https://artmuseum.pl/en/archiwum/archiwum-tadeusza-rolke, accessed 18 November 2020).
Renata Piatkowska