The Creased Page of European Art – Lviv School of Photography
Andrij Bojarov
10.9.2024, 18:30
Municipal Art Center, 11 Stefanyka St.
We invite you to Andrij Bojarov's lecture, which begins the accompanying program for the exhibition "Domowroty / ПОВЕРНЕННЯ / Homing. Włodzimierz Puchalski."
The phenomenon of the Lviv school of photography, which was a part of modern European art for a century before the outbreak of World War II, remains little known in Ukraine today.
The rapid development of photographic technology in the nineteenth century in Lviv was in sync with the leading European capitals, especially with Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of which Lviv was a part at the time. The exhibition of the Vienna Camera Club in Lviv in 1900 was a critical, creative impetus for the founder of the modernist school of photography in the city, Henryk Mikolasz. After gaining international recognition, founding the Lviv Photographic Society, and developing his pedagogical and publishing activities, Mikolasz became the head of the Institute or Department of Photography at Lviv Polytechnic in 1921.
Two years later, Józef Świtkowski, a photographer and representative of the pictorialist movement, began teaching photography at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lviv.
During the interwar period, these two schools gave rise to at least several dozen influential authors in photography and visual arts. One of the most distinctive manifestations was the practice of photomontage and photo collage.
However, 1939 and the outbreak of World War II broke off the nascent artistic impulses and, in fact, caused the decline and future breaks with the Lviv School of Photography. This was mainly due to the deaths of some of the school's members, the forced eviction of others, and repressions against those who remained in the city after 1945.
During the lecture, Andrij Bojarov will focus on the history of the Lviv School of Photography and its figures, bringing back the stories and voices of those who lived and worked in Lviv before 1939.
Andrij Bojarov
A media artist, researcher of the Lviv and Ukrainian avant-garde, independent curator, and architect. As a curator, he works closely with Lviv avant-garde and modern art topics. He curated exhibitions at the Muzeum Sztuki (Museum of Art) in Łódź (2017-2018): “Montages. Deborah Vogel and the New Legend of the City” (the exhibition won the Sybilla award) and “Experiment! Lviv Masters of Photography of the Early Twentieth Century and Their Successors in Poland and Ukraine in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.” Andrij Bojarov is a translator and editor of Piotr Łukaszewicz’s monograph on the Lviv “artes” group of artists.
Credits
Cover Image: Henryk Mikolasch, "Martwa natura" // 1910 // Lviv // The National Museum in Wrocław collection