Over 1,700 photographs by Władysław Toczyłowski are on display in the Phototeque of the Warsaw Rising Museum. The negatives of the photographs by the photojournalist of the first Polish photo agency have been digitised using advanced technical tools.

Toczyłowski’s collection of photographs captures the nature of Polish press photojournalism at the time, the canons of which were only just being forged; there is still a certain static nature and a uniformity of perspective within the same documented event. In depicting official events and figures of the political and military scene, the author adhered to the ‘façade’ convention of the time, required by government circles and, consequently, a press dependent on paid advertisements, including state media.

The collection in the Phototeque of the Warsaw Museum is largely made up of reportages documenting events taking place in Warsaw, such as the ceremonies related to the unveiling of the Aviator monument on Unia Lubelska Square, the Kiliński monument on Krasiński Square, or the monument to the Fallen Sappers on the corner of 6 Sierpnia Street and Topolowa Street (now the intersection of Nowowiejska Street and Niepodległości Avenue).

The exhibits also include photographs of craft guild wagon parades and Gordon Bennett’s balloon competitions, showing both the artist’s sense of humour, manifested in photographing amusing scenes and laughing audiences, and artistic sensitivity, evident in landscape shots of flying balloons.

Born in 1898, in the interwar period Władysław Toczyłowski was an associate of the ‘Propaganda’ Press and Photo Agency, the first photographic agency in Poland. It should be remembered that at that time the term ‘propaganda’, unencumbered by pejorative associations with totalitarian regimes, simply meant propagation, popularisation, propagation. The agency’s founder was Marian Fuks, a famous figure in the press milieu of the Kingdom of Poland and then the Second Republic.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński