Czarnecki witnessed the birth of Solidarity in 1980-81 when he visited Poland. The photographs he made offer a version of those events which purports to go beyond the prepackaged version presented by the media. With several gray, grim photographs -- of the gas chamber and museum at Auschwitz, cemeteries in Warsaw and a bullet-scarred wall -- Czarnecki locates the genesis of contemporary Poland in the horrors of World War II.

In a second group of images, he establishes the manifest presence and influence of the Roman Catholic Church in all of Polish life. Gilded crucifixes, local shrines, processions of traditionally dressed children and robed clergy at public events all portray a daily life immersed in ritual and tradition largely unknown in the more industrial West. Perhaps the real weight of the church in Polish affairs can best be felt in images where religion and politics intersect: in one, a picketing farmer kisses an image of the Black Madonna; in another, priests celebrate a field mass at a Warsaw tractor factory. In captioning the funeral of Cardinal Wyszynski, Czarnecki writes of the event as a "turning point in Polish history resulting in the collapse of the tense but viable coexistence of church and state.

Most of Czarnecki's essay focuses on public meetings, press conferences and protests; placards, graffiti and solemn faces communicate a persistent unrest. Despite the promise of an "inside" view of the events, these stark and dramatic images are precisely those we have seen in the media for the past three years. We can see the results of some grave upheaval, but we find few visual clues as to the home lives, working conditions, economic realities or personal repressions that have generated the demonstrations. Without captions, these photographs -- strongly reminiscent of protest photographs of the turbulent sixties in the United States -- might have occurred almost anywhere. Czarnecki's captions, unfortunately, are more strident than informative and do little to educate the viewer about causes. Too often his rhetoric outshines the impact of what the images show.

Ultimately, Inside Poland and Solidarity is just what Czarnecki asserted it would not be, a dramatic visual shorthand with the "easily digestible theme, the Russians are coming." To speak about the ZOMO (riot policemen) as "drawn from the worst elements of society . . . both hated and feared, representing as [they do] the faceless face of oppression" is to indulge in simplistic propagandizing.

Dotter's American Labor is excerpted from a massive oeuvre assembled over sixteen years as a labor organizer and documentary photographer; the work has usually been seen in union halls and reproduced in labor publications. A small gallery of portraits from various trades introduces Dotter's concerns: smiling black hospital workers, an anorexic ballerina with misshapen feet, telephone operators lost in routine boredom and two unemployed black youths -- one wearing a shirt emblazoned "Patience My Ass," a fitting motto for the entire essay.

Dotter's images leave little question about the causes of his subjects' distress: company towns bisected by heaped coal trains, huge strip-mine shovels manned by Lilliputian laborers, mines where people crawl like moles and dehumanizing factories and shops. The human cost of the jobs is totaled in portraits like those of a black-lung victim, a painfully thin crippled miner, and a baby-faced sixteen-year-old widow. These workers are fighters. Their response is clear and militant, often expressed in signs: "The denim that made blue jeans for you has made brown lung for us"; ÒCotton breathes but we can't"; "Duke Power Co. owns the Brookside mine but they don't own us!" Dotter's captions are factual and dispassionate; numbers of deaths, percentages of injuries and kinds of hazards resulting from the work places. The audience must form its own conclusions from this evidence.

Both Inside Poland and Solidarity and American Labor reflect a belief in a photography of engagement, a photography capable of moving people toward change. The differences between them lie in their approach to the audience. Czarnecki has told us about Poland as he saw it, allowing little room for audience interpretation or education. Dotter attempts to let us see his American for ourselves, trusting that -- given the information -- the audience will surely have a similar interpretation.