A School of Gaze. The City

Photography is a medium that allows for the immortalization of the constantly changing city landscape. The frames collected in the exhibition do not create an image of a single place, but rather arrangements revealing various aspects of the urban experience. They are accompanied by the voices of writers, poets, philosophers, and painters for whom the city became a source of inspiration. One of the figures leading through this narrative is the flâneur armed with a camera – an attentive observer who wanders the streets, looks into windows, enters courtyards, recording what is momentary and fleeting. He observes new phenomena and processes, critically relates to them to better understand them. He reads the city. What is prosaic for others takes on deeper meaning for him. The flâneur – after Charles Baudelaire – is compared to “a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness.”

In his text The Art of Strolling, Franz Hessel – writer and translator – writes that Each of us is deep down a bit of a loafer who occasionally wants to forget the unpleasant reasons for his various movements and move entirely without reason. For such people, the street becomes a waking dream, and shop windows are not offers but landscapes. Hessel recommends, among other things, strolling around one’s neighborhood, which is why the exhibition, following his suggestion, also includes a section dedicated to Łódź.

The urban culture of the “promised land,” alongside customs and art of the 19th and turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, is indeed the daily focus of Muzeum Pałac Herbsta, a branch of Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi. The exhibition presents works by, among others, Karol Beyer, Janusz Maria Brzeski, Leopold Buczkowski, Jan Bułhak, Zofia Chomętowska, Władysław Grabowski, Stefan Kiełsznia, Roman Opałka, Włodzimierz Pfeiffer, Bruno Schulz, Piotr Tomczyk, and Aleksander Zakrzewski. Photographs come from the collection of Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi and, among others, from the archives of Archiwum Państwowe w Łodzi, Muzeum Warszawy, Fundacja Archeologia Fotografii, Biblioteka Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, Biblioteka Narodowa, and Wojewódzka Biblioteka Publiczna im. Marszałka Józefa Piłsudskiego w Łodzi.

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