Over a thousand objects including photographs, films, postcards taken by almost 100 artists will be on display in six rooms of the Museum of Warsaw at an exhibition titled ” Flash, Matte, Colour. Photography and Warsaw in the 1990s”.

The “Flash, Matte, Colour” exhibition reaches into the archives of professional photographers, photojournalists, artists, but also into private family albums. Analogue photography was then a common way of recording reality. And that reality was changing and surprising. The space of the city was taken over by colourful advertisements, glass skyscrapers emerged, there was free trade in the streets, protests and strikes”.

The selection of artists and works was not an easy task. Alongside the already well-established (Edward Hartwig, Tadeusz Rolke, Chris Niedenthal, Anna Beata Bohdziewicz, Anna Musiałówna), the exhibition presents works by young photographers who were entering the free media scene in the 1990s (Maria Zbąska, Piotr Wójcik, Krzysztof Miller), artists (Zofia Kulik, Paweł Althamer, Teresa Gierzyńska), as well as press photographers (Kacper M. Krajewski, Anna Biała, Adam Marzec), filmmakers and documentary filmmakers (Marcel Łoziński, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Barbara Sass).

One part of the exhibition is amateur, family, commemorative non-professional photography.

As a result of the involvement of more than 40 people who responded to the call of collecting non-professional photographs depicting Warsaw in the 1990s, photographs from their collections have been included in a story about memory co-created by photography, showing subjects invisible from the perspective of photojournalism or art.

Parts of the exhibition have been named with slogans from the dictionary characteristic of photography, which at the same time refer to the description of the reality of the 1990s: colour, contrast, narrative or typologies. The photographs, both amateur and professional, capture the decade of transformation and its impact on the urban space.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński