Sopot, Poland, 1987

I do not think anyone could look at a photograph by Andrzej Jerzy Lech and not immediately be struck by its ghostly beauty, its brilliant artistry and craftsmanship, and finally its genius. The beauty, the artistry, and the craft at once arrest the eye and force it to linger over the image. These aspects of Lech's art need little explication or commentary. We look--and instantly we are touched, we are moved, and we want to return to look again simply because the photograph is beautiful and beautifully made. But the genius of Lech's imagery, though equally arresting and compelling, is a more complex matter. That "genius" is not merely a reflection of what is intellectually brilliant about the subjects he chooses and the way he photographs them, in other words, his actual genius for the art of photography. It is also his art's pervading spirit, its genius loci, the source of his creative power. That pervading genius is what is finally so deeply and emotionally rewarding in Lech's work--the genius of memory.

His photographs--without making a single visual reference to the past (other than his post-September 11th images of the New York skyline) reverberate with its memory. I think of his photographs as evocations. You look into them and the past is conjured up out of chemistry and light, and we are transported off through our own memories. What is most amazing is that in order to achieve this effect he has not had to resort to the old photographic processes, which have now become fashionable among the most avant-garde of contemporary photographers. Nor has he had to resort to the lovely but antique Pictorialist aesthetic of soft focus, muted tones, and manipulated negatives. Lech's eye and genius for memory allow him to find the evocative scene that transforms everywhere he might be--Poland, Canada, Germany, the U.S.--into his homeland, just as was the case with Milosz. It is this genius, this pervading spirit, that allows the viewer to traverse time and place with him. Whether we are looking at a train track in Tamworth, Ontario in 1997, a train track that immediately transports me to my childhood nearly half a century earlier in the American South; or a father, mother, and child sitting together on a sofa in Opole in 1985, looking as they might have looked in 1912 or 1939 or 1968; or the morning fog in a park in Ksiaz in 1986, a canal in Gdansk in 1996, or a man, his face obscured by his hand, a bag over his back, and the Baltic Sea beside him at Sopot in 1987; whether we are looking at these or most any of his images, Lech carries us far beyond their physical content. And we are left wondering, "How did he do it? His secret, his magic, is the magic of poetry, of metaphor and powerful imagery. It is the same magic of Milosz, who in his poem "At Dawn" wrote:

How enduring, how we need durability . . . .
The bygone lives are like my own past life, uncertain.
I cast a spell on the city asking it to last.

Lech casts spells and not only makes things last but does it in such a way that they are remembered, again as Milosz does, even by those who have never been to Ksiaz, Gdansk, or Sopot, who have never met the family in Opole or seen the railroad tracks in Tamworth. In another poem from the same volume, Unattainable Earth (Nieobjeta ziemia), Milosz wrote, "In Salem, by a spinning wheel / I felt I, too, lived yesterday." In another, he recreates "1913" by creating a memory of "Italy right after the harvest" as "the McCormick harvester / For the first time moved across our fields." Lech's 1912 Swiss Calendar is in many ways a similar kind of recreation. In still another poem, "Winter," Milosz writes,

And now I am ready to keep running
When the sun rises beyond the borderlands of death.
I already see mountain ridges in the heavenly forest
Where, beyond every essence, a new essence waits. . . .

Do not die out, fire. Enter my dreams, love.
Be young forever, seasons of the earth.

This could be the credo of any artist but especially Andrzej Jerzy Lech, who through the genius of memory turns every image, every essence he has captured, into a new essence awaiting the viewer who will personalize it, who will bring to it his or her own memory and thereby catch the image's truest, yet changing, renewing essence. And if it is not a personal memory, the viewer will find in it an historical one, a memory of a history we have learned or inherited--a memory, for example, of Switzerland in 1912, a peaceful place and moment still two years before the most wrenching change to befall Europe in centuries. The Great War marked the true beginning of the twentieth century, and its cruelty and horror defined that bleak and bloody century's tone. As English poet Philip Larkin put it in his poem "MCMXIV," "Never such innocence, . . . / Never such innocence again." It is often that vital and important memory of innocence that Andrzej Lech recreates in his work.

The twentieth century was the most brutal, the most cruel century in human history--not because modern man had become any more savage than in the past but because the technology of murder had become superior to that of any time before. He could kill—we can and do kill--with greater efficiency than ever before. The world might have been less convenient prior to the Industrial and Technological Revolutions of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, but it was far safer. Prior to the indiscriminate savagery of aerial bombardment, of mustard gas, of tanks, and of an entire generation, an entire generation!, of young men lying dead in the mud, the trenches, and the fields of Europe, no eighteenth, nineteenth, or early twentieth century gentleman would have though himself "innocent." But so much death and maiming changed it all.

The ugliness and horror of the twentieth century caused many artists to feel the only appropriate response to it had to be an art of equal ferocity and brutality. "The age demanded an image / Of it accelerated grimace," as Ezra Pound put it. Though this attitude has changed and the best contemporary art--visual, literary, and musical--seems reinvigorated with a culture of hope, many artists are still obsessed with their work having some "edge," as if affirmation and beauty are not the most radical edges any artist might hone--especially after the moral catastrophe of the past century. To express hope and to find beauty in a world where horrors daily continue to occur is a radical, existential act, an act of faith equal to that demanded by any religion. To suggest through memory a moment and place prior to the disaster, to bring the old world back to mind and then to make us realize we are looking at the new--not Lucerne 1912 but Opole 1985--is an artistic leap of faith, an edge, if you will, of the greatest insight into the human condition. What we first see and think is a moment from a long gone, peaceful past but then realize is our own moment reminds us that art's great power is its ability to redeem, to heal, and to offer hope.

This is the most fundamental characteristic of Andrzej Lech's work, of his genius, and of his use of memory. It is something we also find not just in Milosz but in the art of another countryman of his as well--Wojciech Kilar. Kilar began as a dissonant and experimental Modernist but over the years has come to embrace melody, harmony, consonance, and beauty. The change in his style, first seen in Krzesany (1974), is marked by the embrace of memory. In musical terms it is spoken of as an integration of folklore into his art, but what is folklore but the living memory of a people? After Krzesany came Koscielec 1909, a work he called an attempt to slow down the disastrous seconds which took the life of Mieczyslaw Karlowicz in an avalanche in the Tatras. Then came Orawa, a work that celebrated the sub-Tatra Podhale region, the people and the place. Years earlier Karol Szymanowski had shed his experimental phases with a similar return to folklore for inspiration and a literal return to this same region, to Zakopane itself, a town, which interestingly enough was also home to that strange genius Stanislaw Witkiewicz (Witkacy). Finally with Kilar's Requiem Father Kolbe his embrace of memory is at its most intense and painful, but also most redemptive and healing.

Even when I hear what I know to be folk tunes and rhythms in Kilar, I do not think of Poland; I think of dancing, planting, harvesting, loving--it could be anywhere. He, like Milosz and Lech, have homelands wherever they turn and hear "The song of a child, the conversation of lovers." Just as Milosz wove his American experiences into his art, Lech has done and is doing the same in his American Travel Journal project. I have no doubt that when his Polish audience looks into these American images they will recall certain misty, morning walks in Ksiaz, a kiss on the banks of a canal in Gdansk, a day when they were children playing on the beach at Sopot.

Czeslaw Milosz, Wojciech Kilar, and Andrzej Jerzy Lech—they are a triumvirate of Polish art's response to memory in our time, three artists who imbue their work with memory's persistent but changing genius, a spirit which knows that art has the potential to heal, to redeem, and to recover hope.

John Wood, Lake Charles , Louisiana , February 2003

Author's Note:

John Wood is a prize-winning poet, photographic critic, and art historian. He has published over twenty books, curated the 1995 Smithsonian Institution photographic exhibition Secrets of the Dark Chamber, and is the editor of 21st: The Journal of Contemporary Photography. His writings on photography have been named among the Wall Street Journal's "Year's Best Photography Books 1999," the New York Times Book Review's "Best Photo Books of 1995," the American Library Association's "Outstanding Academic Books of the Year" for 1992, and as the American Photographic Historical Society's Outstanding Book of 1989. He holds Professorships in both English Literature and Photographic History at McNeese University in Louisiana. His most recent works have been his Selected Poems, a volume covering thirty years of work, a book on Jan Saudek, and an edition of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience done in collaboration with Joel-Peter Witkin.

Jersey City , June 11, 2005.

It’s the night, light rain after a huge rainstorm. It’s summer already…

I’m worn out by the day, the heat, the rattle of fan and the noise of the street.

New York summer is difficult and tiring. It’s always very exciting. I like it because of the girls on the streets, the trips to the ocean and Asbury Park.

Asbury Park, New Jersey, 2000.

Asbury Park, my photography, Bruce Springsteen, enigmatic time hanging still in the air, my cute funny room with a green phone and a large brown fridge down the shore.

Contemporary ruins of former greatness. I’ve photographing this photogenic city for years now. I photograph it carefully. Slowly, quietly, and with concentration.

I’m trying to be …

I am and photography helps me with it.

My other photographic place that I like is Coney Island in Brooklyn. I always feel an odd abandonment and somehow lost nest there. Not only my own.

An island of black lovers, drunk homeless, Russian immigrants, cheap greasy pizza, poor inspiration-seeking artist and crazy vagrants.

Coney Island, Brooklyn, 2001.

In the evening in my dark darkroom, with Davis and Baker, I develop my next “secrets”. By the red light and Chianti, alone. Alone because I like it too.

The alchemy of photography has many forms. This is one of them …

I have a new studio, new darkroom, new home. It’s a huge space. Full of light and shadows, plants and books, height, with a huge window that fills an entire wall, with an archetypal view filling it.

The archetype of modern America. Symbols and pictures, stereotypes which I love. Theatrical decoration. A kitschy decoration which I’m crazy about.

My spectacular view from the window of my new studio. Jersey City, New Jersey, April 2005.

I’m happy that I am able to see. If I’m ever unable to see, I will start playing jazz ballads and long lullabies on a Hammond Organ Model M-102.

I’m going to sleep. It’s already 4 am here. You’re probably done with breakfast and coffee….

The other side of the mirror attracts me and pulls me slowly in.

I hope that the next part will come soon.

Hugs,

Your Andrzej

From letters - travel journals of Andrzej Lech (a photographer from New York) to Roberto Michael (a translator from Paris).