Szczecin Press Photographers 1945-1990

Press photography has long been an essential element of media narration. It is difficult to imagine any newspaper without accompanying photographs. Reading studies on the history of the press (or more broadly, mass media) often leaves a sense of incompleteness. Titles, editorial offices, and media personalities are described, yet photojournalists tend to be marginalized. Perhaps this is because they were rarely present in the editorial office? After all, photographs were not created at editors’ desks but in the field. These journalists—formally sharing the same status as their “writing” counterparts—would return to the editorial office mainly to lock themselves in the darkroom (digital photography only emerged in the second half of the first decade of the 2000s) to develop film. By the time the prints were evaluated and prepared for publication, they were usually already out in the field again. The passage of time, the rush of current events, and the constant undervaluation of this category of journalists’ work have led to many of them being unknown to the majority of readers, even though some of their works are well known. This text organizes the knowledge available to the Author about these individuals—most of whom are no longer living. The initial attempts to create this work took place many years ago, and thus it is partly based on the accounts of those involved. Natural gaps in memory are supplemented, as much as possible, by preserved documents. As in many similar cases, there is a feeling of inadequacy both in the accounts and in the outputs of the bureaucratic machine. The low culture of archiving has left its particular mark here. Particularly painful is the thoughtless destruction of negative and positive archives carried out in editorial offices at the dawn of a new era.