georgia Krawiec & Jerzy Lewczyński
A few years ago Jerzy Lewczyński, one of the most influential Polish post-war photographers, made one hundred copies of a negative image of an angel sculpture and sent it to photographers all over the world to interact with it. The aim of this initiative called “Szlachetna Inicjatywa” [engl. Noble Initiative] was to let other photographers find their own artistic interpretation of Lewczyński’s photo. This is how georgia Krawiec has got in touch with the negative.
georgia Krawiec was born in the industrial town of Kędzierzyn-Koźle in Poland. Sławięcice is a district of her birth town. Here in Sławięcice, where her parents were celebrating their engagement, Lewczyński discovered the sculpture of the neglected Angel in 1960 on a backyard of a Silesian Agricultural Production Cooperative and photographed it. georgia Krawiec’s biographical proximity to the angel sculpture inspired her to create eleven collages „Study of the properties of an angel on the example of salt print”, based on the original negative image of Lewczyński’s angel.
The collages of georgia Krawiec partly refer allegorically to an angel of death, sometime they have humorous undertones or refer to gender issues. Each of the collages consists of different parts of the same image of the angel. The individual paper cuttings derived from salt prints that have been developed in different variants, resulting in the emergence of polychromes in the pictures. georgia Krawiec also used salt prints that showed faulty chemical reactions such as metal reflecting silver or low sensibility. The signatures under the collages are set up according to the principles of Rebus. They refer the individual image components to the respective experimental formulations of salt print processes.
All image components of collage come from salt prints of this photograph. At the bottom of images are the formulas for salt print, from which the individual parts of the collage were produced.
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