Archiwum martwych twarzy. Pamięć i szkło
Memory and Glass. Archive of Dead Faces

Summary/Abstract: The topic of this text is the photographic archive of Stefania Gurdowa. An unexpected discovery of her 1200 glass negatives, walled up in an attic in one of the town houses in Dębica, was made in 1997. Intermittent numbering demonstrates that we are dealing with fragments of a wider photographic body (whose extent remains unknown). The very existence of this collection (which is actually coincidental) generates two important questions: what does the process of situating photographs within an archival context say about them, but also what do they contribute to knowledge about the composite and unambiguous idea of an archive? While attempting to bring the Gurdowa archive alive the author of the article confronts the artist’s glass images (in a representative selection) with poems-biograms from Spoon River Anthology by E.L. Masters.

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