Un/bearable Lightness of Being

“In his hammock, swaying under the leafy trees of the Amazon, Darcy reveled in his favorite book. On every page, he let out a belly laugh, and the local children laughed with him. None of them knew how to read, but they all knew how to laugh.”

Eduardo Galeano, Hunter of Stories

Private photo albums are filled with sincerity; family secrets rarely get to be hidden there. In those photographs, you can clearly recognise who is happy, sad or angry, who likes being photographed and who hates it. Images from family collections are realistic, and depict in a natural manner our way of living, habits, our ordinary, everyday moments and special situations we want to preserve. In this exhibition, we focused on the photos showing the moments of joy, happiness, love, friendship and the beauty of time spent together.  

The exhibition includes the collection of vernacular photography, dated 1900–1990, from the internet archives of Fortepan, which currently contains over 180 thousand images. The photographs are donated voluntarily by individual persons and institutions. They are free for everyone to view, download and use for any purpose. The project was initiated in 2010 in Budapest. This year, Fotofestiwal has joined it by collecting many photos from Poland. Much of the material collected so far comes from the photographic archives of Veolia Energia Łódź, where photographs depicting the history of the company and its employees from the early 20th century until the 1980s are kept. 

The word ‘vernacular’ means indigenous, non-professional, often created by anonymous authors and amateurs rooted in local tradition. Ours is also, in a sense, an amateur exhibition (from the Latin word amare – to love, amateur – a person who takes part in an activity for pleasure), because we have been passionately collecting, analysing and sharing photographs for many years, and this is only the beginning of our collaboration within the Fortepan project. Let us therefore make a reference to the title of the exhibition and that of Milan Kundera’s book to conclude: an existence that misses deep feelings is meaningless; the lightness of being denotes emotional awareness, natural expression and freedom!

Krzysztof Candrowicz

The exhibition is a part of the ‘Fortepan Method’ project, co-funded under the Creative Europe Programme.
To learn more about the Fortepan project, visit www.fortepan.hu.
Exhibition partner: Veolia Energia Łódź, MKS: Polesie

Anyone can become a co-creator of Fortepan. If you wish to share photos, please email us via e-mail at: archiwum@fotofestiwal.com. You can also bring your photos to the Local Activity Office at ul. Tuwima 10 in Łódź, between 9 am and 3 pm on weekdays.

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The part of exhibition could be unavailable during the classes in the exhibition space.