Despite its seeming inclusive title, Photography in Poland does not attempt a survey of Polish photography. Instead, it presents images by sixteen photographers chosen with a specific and rather narrow collecting bias. Of the thirty-seven prints exhibited, thirty-one are manipulated, collaged, multiple-printed or made by alternative processes. The works comprise three fairly distinct groups: prewar photographs, postwar photographs, and photographs made immediately before or during the war but printed subsequently.

Among the prewar works are two strong portraits by Marian Dederko: a moody Portrait of the Actor Tadeusz Frankiel (1924) in gum bichromate and an allegorical study of a woman, Sabbath Flight (1925). These are romantic images suggesting Poland's rich history of theater. While the earlier of them (made in 1924, not 1925) was produced in the same year as AndrŽ Breton's Surrealist Manifesto, there is no evidence here of that artistic and social revolution; these early Polish photographers were influenced primarily by pictorialism.

Many of the postwar photographs are also concerned primarily with technique. A rather large number are contemporary gum bichromates -- seven by Witold Dederko and two by Marian Gadzalski. With the exception of Dederko's intense Portrait of Andrzej Wajda (1975) (which is remarkable similar to Marian Dederko's 1924 images), these are essentially pretty pastel pictures of leaves, clouds, horses and rippling ponds. Alekxander Krzywoblocki is represented by five large silver prints (1948-50) "derived from collages" of Greek sculpture and architecture. Clearly, surrealism had reached Poland by 1948, but these are illustrations, rather than genuine experiences, of assemblage.

Under the hands of Zofia Rydet, however, collage produces quite ominous and terrible imagery. In Untitled (1955), a narrow cobbled street lined with vacant buildings is empty of life but for an abandoned rocking horse, a broken armchair and a shadowed man in topcoat and hat. Printed within his dark, featureless shape is a small, barely perceptible portrait of his haunted face. In Untitled (1960), a thin soldier in ancient uniform stands stiffly at attention before a long avenue of stately old trees; his helmet is tucked neatly under one arm, and his is missing one foot, both hands and his head. These photographs evoke our most chilling fears about life and death in Poland, as does Untitled (1948) by Irena Jarosinski. In that image, a broken stone figure in flowing robes, and with absent head and hands, reaches toward the viewer. On the ground lie three ruined stone heads. Henryk Hermanowicz utilizes a vast, devastated interior -- perhaps that of a synagogue -- to stage a scene from his manipulated Untitled (from a series on themes from the Kabbala) (1973). Although the human occupants of the cold interior have long since vanished, the mystical figures still perform their ancient rituals. These postwar images involve memory, destruction and loss. In some, it is merely nostalgic; in others, it is darkly resonant of some savagery beneath the veneer of human civilization.

Perhaps the most fascinating photographs in this exhibit are those made immediately prior to or during the war, and printed since. Stefan Kielznia's Street in the Jewish Quarter of Lubin (1937) is the sole evidence in the exhibit of daily life in Poland. In it, two young boys in caps and knickers pose awkwardly for the photographer while old men in Orthodox garb talk in the background. The viewer is allowed only a glimpse of this busy, crowded, and substantial community which has since been utterly destroyed. Warsaw (1945), by Leonard Sempolinski, pictures a very similar ghetto street reduced to rubble by Nazi bombs. Among the black shadows of demolished buildings and the broken paving stones, a solitary, bent old woman walks carefully where the street once lay. What seems at first glance to be a pile of rags in Sempolinski's Aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising (1944) proves instead to be a tattered male corpse caked with dirt and debris. Only these very few "real-world" photographs provide a key to the symbolism in the most effective of the postwar images.

The absence of other genres of photography -- documentary, editorial, commercial, studio, or personal -- leaves the viewer of Photography in Poland at a curious distance from the Poland where millions of people have lived and worked, suffered and died, and even more alienated from the Poland where today millions live in a Socialist country known to us only through the nightly news. While the exhibit includes some very compelling photographs, as well as some which are merely decorative, it permits no substantial understanding either of photography in Poland or of Poland through its photography.