Wolves, white bears and memories
In this article, you can read the editorial from our latest newsletter written by Eidolon-director Róza Tekla Szilágyi, which were sent out on June 4th, 2024. We publish our monthly editor's letters, in which we reflect on recent events, approximately two weeks after the newsletter is out.
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Hello there,
Creating an institution that lets one spend an abundance of time looking at family and domestic photography I am no less inspired by the unveiling of histories and narratives behind these photographs than the images themselves. As a person interested in subjective histories, Paul Auster’s work circling around and often inspired by family chronicles (4 3 2 1), the different forms of memory (The Invention of Solitude) was always something that led me to discoveries about how and why keeping these familiar narrative loops around is a great and paramount task.
I finished reading the last chapter of Paul Auster’s Baumgartner, his last novel published before his death just before sitting down to write this month’s editorial letter, and there is a particular part of the book that made me think about the hiatus – hiatus of images depicting important happenings in our joined society and close circle –, and some images I came by recently thanks to the latest Vernacular Social Club I was lucky enough to attend.
Paul Auster photographed in June 1993 in Brooklyn, New York by Arnold Newman
In Baumgartner, there is a passage describing a story about the wolves of the western Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk. The novel’s protagonist travels to the Ukrainian city to know more about his own family history, as his grandfather was allegedly born there – and during this visit, he meets with a poet turned out to be a Buddhist who tells the story of the thousand wolves who occupied the city sometime before the Soviet army rolled in to capture Ivano-Frankivsk in July 1944. Auster begins this part of his book – a part that was originally published as a short story in 2020 – with the following sentences: “Does an event have to be true in order to be accepted as true, or does belief in the truth of an event already make it true, even if the thing that supposedly happened did not happen? And what if, in spite of your efforts to find out whether the event took place or not, you arrive at an impasse of uncertainty and cannot be sure if the story someone told you on the terrace of a café in the western Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk was derived from a little known but verifiable historical event or was a legend or a boast or a groundless rumor passed on from a father to a son? Even more to the point: If the story turns out to be so astounding and so powerful that your mouth drops open in wonder and you feel that it has changed or enhanced or deepened your understanding of the world, does it matter if the story is true or not?”
In Auster’s story, it turns out that there is no image surviving depicting the wolves, and the animals left no trace in the Soviet propaganda films “intended to glorify the heroic goodness and valour of the Soviet Union”.
This leads us to the conclusion that there are two cases – one not more austere (pun intended) than the other. One is where we find ourselves on the task of tirelessly looking for imagery that can underline our memory and end up with a notable image hiatus. The other one is when we have tons of intriguing photographs but have to work on finding out the original narrative behind the image corpus just to be able to grasp the original context of the imagery before our eyes.
I recently found one of the greatest examples demonstrating the second scenario. While I was in Lodz Jean-Marie Donat, co-founder of the Vernacular Social Club organised a meeting where I could hear the story behind the White Bear in Barbara Caillot and Aleksandra Karkowska’s interpretation, as their joined enterprise has been researching the topic for years, creating a vast collection and a photobook that earned them the jury’s special mention in the Historical Book category during last year’s Arles book award. Barbara and Aleksandra are founders of Oficyna Wydawnicza Oryginały, a publishing house and research endeavour working on finding stories preserved in memory, awakening valuable memories, and passing them on. In this case, the story they are passing on is the White Bear of Zakopane, exploring how thousands of pictures of White Bears have become a symbol of Polish popular culture over the past 100 years.
Source: Fortepan
Interestingly the White Bear topic is not unreferenced, as Jean-Marie has a collection himself that he exhibited at Les Rencontres de la Photographie at Arles in 2015 – and coming back from the trip, Fortepan’s founder, Miklós Tamási also sent me some imagery from the online archive depicting the same White Bear.
Wehrmacht officers … and bear, photograph from the Jean-Marie Donat Collection
Thinking about the two scenarios I have a remaining question. What has a greater chance of survival: stories that sound unexpected, but come without any pictorial illustration or photos that stand on their own and depict unexpected things that we don't know the story of? I do hope that Eidolon Centre for Everyday Photography’s current and future endeavours will connect people endlessly searching for photographs, with those who are relentlessly searching for the marginalised narratives behind them.
Warm regards,
Róza Tekla Szilágyi
director of Eidolon Centre for Everyday Photography
You can find all previous editor's letters at this link.
Featured image: Still from the movie Bialy niedzwiedz (The White Bear), 1959, director: Jerzy Zarzycki
