Knowing
A black-and-white photo: a man, a woman, a child. In a boat, on a pond. Let us say that this is the pond in the city park in Zamość that was created in the 1920s on the premises of a former fort, for the photo comes from the local archives. Warsaw gardener and planner Walerian Kronenberg beautifully designed the greenery and the water, created a place for Zamość residents to rest, to play, to contemplate. Clouds were reflected in the water; all one had to do was set forth from the marina in a boat or kayak, and one ended up in the sky. “Whoever looks at the sky in the water sees fish in the trees,” says a Chinese proverb.
The photographer is standing on the pier or on the shore. On this shore or that shore. The three people in the boat are bidding him farewell, or greeting him.
It would be simplest to say: a family on a Sunday walk, a picnic, recreation. And add that there was joy and carefreeness, and many were reckoning that there would be no war after all. A young, elegant woman, laughing. A little girl with carefully braided pigtails, with a teddy bear under her arm. And a man who understands everything, the one who knows, who knows the way, the guide.
The painting based on an archival photograph – just a painting: two adults and a child with a teddy bear under her arm – never did happen. The man’s burning, intense gaze contradicted the idyll of the innocent generic scene; the reflections in the water were not those of fish on trees, but rather of hanged people; the man slowly lost his human face, grew the ears of a jackal and, finally, revealed himself as Anubis and allowed the painter to see and recognize him. Thus did the story of one photo from a moment before the catastrophe of 1939 and one painting from 2012 give rise to a painting cycle.
As Susan Sontag explains, Any photograph has multiple meanings; indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of fascination. The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: “There is the surface. Now think—or rather feel, intuit —what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.” Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.
Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no. Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph.
Translated by Karol Thornton-Remiszewski
The text by Małgorzata Czyńska is the foreword to the second volume of the artbook “Anubis. Thin Places” (Timof Comics Publishing House, 2024).
