Lecture: “From daguerreotype to artistic photography. The beginnings of Polish photography”

29 September 2025, 12.00

We invite you to a lecture from the Decades with Art series, which will be devoted to the development of photography in Poland. We will discuss the achievements of the first Polish photographers, the role of photography in documenting social life, and the artistic flourishing of this field.

News about the invention of photography quickly reached Poland. The first daguerreotype exhibitions took place on Polish soil as early as the late 1830s, and the press and trade publications of the time were full of articles devoted to this technique. As in France and Great Britain, the first Polish photographers were primarily scientists – experimenters and inventors, as well as travellers and collectors. Over time, interest in this medium also reached artistic circles, and photography, from a tool for documenting and recording reality, also became an area of artistic expression.

During a lecture accompanying the exhibition “The Untamed Has No Words: Michał Korta” (25 April – 2 June 2024), Dr Małgorzata Jędrzejczyk will discuss the pioneering achievements of the first Polish photographers, the development of photographic studios and the role of photography in documenting social and political life. She will also discuss the links between photography and painting and graphic art, as well as the activities of the first photographic societies and clubs.

Lecture from the series “Decades with Art”.

The meeting will be held online via the Zoom platform.

Participation in the lecture is free of charge.

To receive a link to the meeting, please send your application to: warsztaty@mck.krakow.pl

The lecture will be held in Polish.

Dr. Małgorzata Jędrzejczyk – art historian, curator. Studied art history at Jagiellonian University, Universität Wien and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Graduate of the interdisciplinary study program Environment-Technology-Society (UJ). Author of scholarly articles on 20th century art and architecture and publications in exhibition catalogs and journals. Co-editor of an anthology of “image/body texts” and publication “Composing Space. Sculptures of the avant-garde”. Co-author and curator of the artistic and scientific program “Exercising Modernity” (Pilecki-Institut Berlin). As part of her doctoral thesis being prepared at the Institute of Art History at the Jagiellonian University, she is conducting research on the concept of space in the work of Katarzyna Kobro.

The series is under the auspices of the magazine “Głos Seniora”.