Jędrzej
Sokołowski

Jacques Henri Lartigue

In his blog, the photographer publishes pictures he took in his childhood, thus touching on the role of archives in the process of recounting the past.

On the one hand, launching a blog of this type could be seen as a demonstrative refusal to participate in the technological race for relevance and, on the other, as a statement: the young eye filters images not through reason, but from the heart, and is thus truly free (candid, genuine). By referring back to his own history, Sokołowski exposes the role photographers play in the process of creating history and stories of the past. As a child, he took photographs unconsciously. For him – to borrow Lartigue’s metaphor – the camera was an eye of memory.

Even though taking those photographs may have been an unconscious choice, the decision to exhibit them was not. Sokołowski began showing his past creations from a current perspective by publishing a self-portrait, a portrait of his father, and photographs of Warsaw. The striking authenticity of photographs from the family archive gives one the impression of mingling with something untainted by modernity, a faithful trace of the past. Sokołowski’s private archive seems poles apart from the perfect reproductions of the world that are so readily available on the Internet.

Looking at works like these, which seem more convincing years later, we should remember that every time we dip into an archive of historic images, we create a new reality. The images we select, how we present them, and the comments that accompany them offer a vision of the past from a modern-day viewpoint.