Działania artystyczne w gdańskim środowisku fotograficznym promujące fotografię marynistyczną w latach 1948-1981

Abstract

With Gdansk artists an approach to the subject of the marine photography, was marked on several levels – artistic, documentary, journalistic and usable. Since 1945 to the first half of the 80s, we notice the popularization of maritime theme in the environment throughout artistic exhibition activities, and the program objectives. Maritime photography or maritime themes in photography? An analysis of the photographic medium in terms of belonging to the art can give the answer to this question. It is also worth considering whether there was „Gdansk School of the Maritime Photography”? The phenomenon of Polish marine art in the case of photography has been strongly emphasized in the Gdansk photography environment. The traditional display of the maritime theme has been broken, and with the approval of the authorities. Shipyard workers and dockers joined to the effigy of the sea people (fishermen, sailors). Photographers began to enter the maritime economy and use the effects of cooperation with maritime institutions for artistic purposes. Thematic exhibitions on shipyards and ports were created showing the sea from a different point of view, from the perspective of land. Socio-political events related to Solidarity stopped the promotion of the sea through the image of a shipyard worker and a shipyard, which became icons of the struggle for freedom. The Gdansk photographic community after the socio-political crisis of the first half of the 1980s, has not yet rebuilt its leading position in the dissemination of the maritime theme in photography on a large scale. Maritime exhibitions still appeared, but mainly on the local level, and the sea was reduced to the landscape understood very traditionally. At the same time photographers of the younger generation were interested in completely different issues of the style and aesthetics of photography. Te slogan „face to the sea” ceased to correspond with new times.