The School of Looking. The City

The exhibition “The School of Looking. The City” encourages walking, observation, and treating urban squares, streets, and courtyards as if they were a piece of literature. Through a dialogue between photography and the written word—spanning from the second half of the 19th century to the present day—a space is created to reflect upon the urban landscape. The starting point is the work of Antoni Mikołajczyk. The artist moved with a camera set to a long exposure time, recording the traces of glowing streetlamps and car headlights. The photograph does not depict the night street or the light sources in a realistic manner; rather, it is a record of the relationship between space, time, and the human being. The exhibition focuses on these very aspects—the methods of recording, experiencing, and perceiving.

Photography is a medium that allows for the immortalization of the ever-changing landscape of the city. The frames gathered in the exhibition do not form an image of a single place, but rather arrangements that reveal 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 central figures guiding us through this narrative is the flâneur, armed with a camera—an attentive observer who wanders the streets, peers into windows, and enters courtyards to record that which is momentary and vanishing. He observes new phenomena and processes, relating to them critically to better understand them. He “reads” the city. What appears mundane to others takes on a deeper meaning for him. The flâneur—following Charles Baudelaire—is compared to a “kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness.

Portrait of a Man; Sebald, Józef; late 19th / early 20th century (1895–1905); Museum of Art in Łódź.

In his text The Art of Walking, Franz Hessel—writer and translator—states that “deep down, each of us is something of a pavement-pounder (szlifibruk), who from time to time wishes to forget the unpleasant reasons for his various movements and move about for no reason at all. For such people, the street becomes a daydream, and shop windows are not offers, but landscapes.“ Hessel recommends, among other things, walking through one’s own neighborhood; therefore, the exhibition, following his lead, also includes a section dedicated to Łódź. Indeed, the urban culture of the “Promised Land”—alongside the customs and art of the 19th and the turn of the 20th century—is the daily focus of the Herbst Palace Museum, a branch of the Museum of Art in Łódź.

Brunon Szultz, Revolution in the city, 1922

The exhibition presents works by artists such as: Karol Beyer, Janusz Maria Brzeski, Leopold Buczkowski, Jan Bułhak, Zofia Chomętowska, Władysław Grabowski, Stefan Kiełsznia, Roman Opałka, Włodzimierz Pfeiffer, Brunon Szultz, Piotr Tomczyk, and Aleksander Zakrzewski.

The photographs are sourced from the collection of the Museum of Art in Łódź (Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi) as well as the holdings of the State Archive in Łódź, the Museum of Warsaw, the Archaeology of Photography Foundation, the University of Łódź Library, the National Library, and the Marshal Józef Piłsudski Voivodeship Public Library in Łódź.

Exhibition curator: Katarzyna Kończal