Prime minister Mazowiecki's government, 1989

Krzysztof Pruszkowski is concerned with conceptual photography. He touches upon subjects of the multitude of spaces and times. He has perfected photosynthesis, a photographic technique based on multiple exposure. The photographs displayed here originate from an exceptional reportage published in 1990 by the prestigious Swiss cultural magazine 'DU', in a special edition dedicated to Warsaw, titled 'Warschau. Der Anfang einer Geschichte'- 'Warsaw. The Beginning of History'. The editor-in-chief of 'Du', Dieter Backmann, who saw the large exhibition of Krzysztof Pruszkowski's work titled 'Photosynthesis' at the Museum of Photography in Lausanne, placed a unique order with the author. He asked for Krzysztof Pruszkowski to make a reportage about Warsaw in photosynthesis exclusively for 'Du' at the time when the communist era ended and the process of transforming the system of government began. Photosynthesis is an original method in photography developed by Pruszkowski starting from 1975, based on opposition to Henri Cartier- Bresson's 'deciding moment' doctrine, which was ubiquitous in reportages, and the proposal of multi-exposure in a single frame in search of a more complete conveying of the 'essence' of the registered sum of many similar events in time and space. In a conversation with Maciej Stepinski, Krzysztof Pruszkowski had the following explanation of his photographic method: 'I began my multiple exposure experiments in 1975. In contrast to classical photography in ‘monopose’, I began working analogously to the structures used in music. And so chords were created: photographic images in ‘bi-pose’, ‘tri-pose’, ‘quadro-pose’ etc. Photosynthesis is the superposition of many temporospatial situations on one another, which I am convinced ‘should meet’, and their registration on a single film. This technique enriches the content of a photographic image and simultaneously refines the form and provides it with an enigmatic dimension, in the form of an ‘aura’ that is supposedly absent from photography in the opinion of experts on aesthetics. In contrast to photography in monopose, which yields a simple image and seemingly presents undoubtable reality, photosynthesis provides a complicated image, full of doubt, and it is strictly related to reality while not representing it at the same time. Photosynthesis provided the possibility of enriching, supplementing an image by layering, similarly to the process in drawing or painting' (Maciej Stepinski, Pracy raczej unikam. Conversation with Krzysztof Pruszkowski, Magazyn Szum, 05.03.2016).

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