There’s More To Life Than Work

If we look at the history of the 19th and 20th centuries, we see that in the life of the average person, most of the hours of almost every day, week, month and year were filled with work. Perhaps this is why it so often became part of identity, and close relationships were formed in the workplace. Sometimes several generations of one family were united by the same profession. Sometimes migrant people created families and communities completely from scratch, based precisely on the workplace.

That is why it is so difficult when examining archival photos to delineate where the boundaries between professional and private life run on them. The richness of Lodz’s social life, immortalized in old photographs, played out at the intersection of these two areas. They can be found today in Lodz’s archives, both family and institutional, where different eras, professions and social classes, different moments of life are mixed.

When we take out of these collections immovable images of work or, on the contrary, of fairettes, holidays and leisure time, we do not see the crisis, war and destruction, nor tragic historical events of the past two centuries. What is not seen should be remembered by looking carefully at what is, which can be arranged into a story of persistence and change experienced by successive generations of Lodz residents.

At the exhibition There’s More To Life Than Work, the first axis of the story is marked by photos related to work in Lodz – not only in the textile factories associated with the city, but also in kitchens, pharmacies, sewers, hospitals, offices and construction sites. The second axis consists of private photos – neither as banal nor as innocent as they might seem at first glance.

/ Curator: Marta Madejska

/ Organizer: Muzeum Miasta Łodzi

/ Exhibition partner: Veolia