| Fortunata Obrąpalska, born
1909 in Wołyń, took amateur interest in photography in
the mid 1930s. The overall style of her early
photographic works (originating in Lithuania, then
followed by the ones made in Poznań in the late 1940s)
were clearly influenced by the aesthetics of Jan Bułhak.
Typically for that period, they are are very much
anchored in the convention of realism with a distinctive
touch of pictorial impressionism. The end of the Second World War prompted Obrąpalska to make some inroads in the application of several innovative techniques in her works, which soon secured her a prominent position within the ranks of Poland's eminent avant-garde photographer artists. Her experiments with the creative potential of the photographic medium as regards the works dating back to the late 1940s in Poland are perhaps closest in character to the photographic output of Zbigniew Dłubak. Experiments with the structural photography (i.e. involvement with textures at large) which inspired her avid interest in the mid 1950s effectively served as a staging post to the next phase in her artistic development. Both periods of her artistic development were separated by the arrival of real socialism (popularly known as "socrealism") in Poland. Obrąpalska did manage, however, to stay on the sidelines of the orthodox stylistics imposed on the fine arts, successfully avoiding commissions for any crude propagandist work. All her photographs originating from the mid 1950s exhibit consistently high standard, many of them making proficient use of the specialist processing techniques (e.g. solarizations, pseudo-solarization, multiple negative image duplication). The concluding period in her photographic career was dominated by nature photography, well reflected in the works commissioned from her by the Academy of Agriculture in Poznań throughout the 1950s. Comprising predominantly routine photographic documentation to a diversity of academic studies, they are by no means devoid of a distinctively artistic touch. Her approach to the studied objects clearly reveals a deep-seated sensitivity, idiosyncratic to her perception of the world at large. The present exhibition embraces merely a part of the bequest made to the Museum of Photography by Fortunata Obrąpalska at the beginning of 2001. The entire collection comprises 200 prints, being in fact the largest single collection of her photographic works made available to a museum, representing all principal domains of her artistic endeavours. The collection is also augmented by a large number of test prints, thus facilitating a good insight into the very nature of the successive experiments with the processing techniques, frequently accommodating all sorts of technological innovations, ever so keenly applied by Obrąpalska in her artistic quest, before she felt satisfied the that final result was actually the desirable one. Curator of the exhibition: Monika Kozień-Świca |