Artist of the day: Artist of the day, January 10: Tadeusz Sumiński, Polish photojournalist, portraits, fashion photographer

Thursday, January 10, 2019

Artist of the day, January 10: Tadeusz Sumiński, Polish photojournalist, portraits, fashion photographer

Tadeusz Sumiński (1924 - 2009) was a Polish photojournalist, portraits, and even fashion photographyer, born into a landed gentry family in east-central Poland. His youth – as was the case with his entire generation – was brutally brought to a halt in 1939.

Sumiński proved his maturity five years later by taking part in the Warsaw Uprising (Battalion Zośka). After the war he began studying economics at the Warsaw School of Economics. But he was not destined to pursue an academic career. In 1949 Sumiński was sent to prison.

After Sumiński got out of prison, he finished his studies (1952) thanks to his thesis supervisor’s support and started working in Spółdzielczy Instytut Naukowy. However, it became clear that all his promotion prospects in the field of science were obsolete due to his participation in the Warsaw Uprising and his landed gentry roots.

Sumiński became interested in photography while he was still a student. Initially it wasn’t a fascination, but a consequence of coming to realize that he wasn’t particularly gifted when it came to drawing. He did, however, have a huge need to create and could devote himself to it. He would make enlargements by night in his tiny room, wrap the sensitized photographic papers in black foil, and go to the other side of town where he could develop them.

Sumiński’s job was to choose existing photos for scenarios of exhibitions, devoted mostly to the economy. If CAF wasn’t in possession of such photographs, Sumiński had to look for them in private archives. After a few years spent in CAF, Sumiński quit and started working in Wytwórnia Filmów Medycznych, where he filmed (using an Arriflex 35 camera) various surgeries and medical procedures. He spent only a few years in the studio before finding employment in the Institute of Industrial Design, run by Wanda Telakowska, where he was occupied with fashion photography, among other activities.

At the end of 1961, time for another change came: Sumiński began his cooperation with the Polonia enterprise, the publisher of Polska magazines. It was issued in three versions: the first one was intended for Western countries, the second for Eastern Europe and the USSR, and the third one, published in English and French as, accordingly. Sumiński worked for the third issue as a photojournalist. This position was prestigious and gave him an opportunity that was very rare in Communist Poland, namely the chance to travel. He visited Western Africa and Mongolia among other places, but also discovered the many faces of Poland that were unavailable to most people.

Sumiński’s first individual exhibition opened in 1963 in Kordegarda gallery in Warsaw – at that time, the official gallery of the Ministry of Culture and Art. The event gave rise to a series of exhibitions that would be presented over the next years, under the common title of Niebo w krajobrazie. In his artistic credo Sumiński declared that he considers the documentative quality of photography as its highest value, but he is unable to get rid of his will to aestheticize. This dualism was noticeable during the 1985 exhibition titled Anatomia krajobrazu, presented in the now-defunct Mała Galeria in Warsaw.

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