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Cultural Production of the Real Through Picturing Difference in the Polish Media: 1940s—1960s to Susan Sontag, a photo essay as a genre became established during the Second World War, but it was in Magnum after 1947 that artists assigned themselves the task of creating a chronicle of their times, of war and peace, of providing a balanced testimony free from chauvinist prejudices (Sontag 2010: 44-45). This was also the time of the triumph of photography as a main medium and of photographers without frontiers. The photographs published in Swiat in most cases represented high aesthetic values. Apart from propaganda elements, in which the Other was seen as the class enemy, the subjects of everyday life prevailed. Today they provide an example of documenting Poland and Polish daily life in the 1940s—1950s. Their subject matter covered a young and joyous country in 1957, Poland’s ethnic and religious diversity, urban streets and balls, Warsaw’s bars and theatres. Foreign subjects also appeared, including Chinese landscapes and the revolution, exotic India, the history of Leningrad, a traditional Egyptian wedding reception, and animals in Sudan. Similar topics could be found in another illustrated weekly, Przekrdj, beside Polish motifs, everyday life practices, and images from around the world. In 1956 (Fig. 10) the weekly published a report from “our own correspondent” from Brazil, about a stay of a Pole, Zygmunt Sulistrowski, among wild Camayura Indians (which means the “Tribe of the Sun). The aim of the weeklies was to present people and society that had already recovered from the horrors of war, that were focused on the future, that were developing and open to the world, and that even participated in the world’s research on equal terms. In accordance with the attitude stating that life took place and played out within interpersonal relations, cheerfulness prevailed in these representations; there was a lack of images of destruction and problems and the recipient received scenes wherein a human being with the recipient's own aspirations and hopes took centre stage. Such an effect was achieved mostly through what was not shown. The pictures appear to be true yet are superficial, not penetrating what is hidden behind the facade; the weeklies were making imagery characteristic of the 1950s and later. Boundaries in the photographs from around the world were practically invisible. They can be seen only in the case of such representations as the photo in Figure 10, in which the differentiating criterion is the civilization. The Indians from Brazil were shown in a classic manner—as lower beings—from the perspective of their culture’s development. The pictures of the world had a positive character and they were reduced to stressing the difference, presenting these people as living outside our own community. We doubt whether these pictures were consistent with the everyday experience of the people because of the reality of the Cold War and its consequences living in a closed society with images of the external world, controlled by the authorities. Both weeklies, Swiat and Przekréj, maintained a high artistic level, and the audience treated both these magazines as the “prettier” picture of “our” reality of 43
