Andrzej Różycki. Fotograf i fotozof
Andrzej Różycki. Photographer and Photosopher

Summary/Abstract: A synthetic summary of the oeuvre of Andrzej Różycki, with particular emphasis on his photographic theory and praxis. The point of departure for auteur interpretations of the artist’s works is an evocation of a monographic exhibition featured in 2004 at the Museum of the History of Photography in Kraków. The conception of this text, partially referring to the scenario of the exhibition, constitutes an attempt at a successive retrospective approach to the multi-motif oeuvre of Andrzej Różycki, made almost twenty years later. An essential supplement of the theme interpretations are references to texts accompanying the artist’s exhibitions.Różycki’s compositions are universal and, at the same time, personal. His self-presence in art is linked with expressing ambivalent stands spanning from emphasis on the rank of the creative mission to an unconventional artistic joke and sometime irony. A successive, equally essential motif is reference to the sacrum sphere, in which the presence of spirituality is linked with an awareness of the infinite rank of the past and memory. The ambiguity of existential reflection is also expressed by works disclosing time continuity while simultaneously pertaining to the complexity of the meanings of reality, in which prosaic motifs are linked with symbolic-mystical ones. Many of the compositions, in particular those created by using the strategy of the quotation, disclose a mood of nostalgic reflection or melancholy.Conclusions of the presented text deal with the rank attained by Różycki’s art. Its special features include originality and a constant striving towards creative autonomy expressed in, i.a. a relentless undermining of the ideological stereotypes of art and a search for new formal solutions. The works of Różycki indubitably constitute one of the most significant phenomena not only in the history of photography but also of twentieth-century Polish art.

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