This paper explores the photographic methods that the Poland-based Landkentnish (Yiddish for “knowing the land”) movement employed in the interwar period to preserve Jewish Heritage, promote Jewish culture, and establish Poland as a home for the Jewish people at a time when Polish nationalism arose. The movement wished to increase the exposure of Polish Jews to Poland’s diverse landscapes with the intention of strengthening their connection to the Polish land. It also aspired to survey Jewish monuments and create archives of local Jewish cultural heritage to attest to the long history of Polish Jewry. With the intensification of Polish nationalism hindering the ability of the Jews to live among the Poles as equals without giving up their cultural identity, leaders of the Landkentnish movement identified photography as a medium capable of giving material expression to the place of the Jews in Polish society and culture. They, thus, established a Photographic Section and tasked it to: a) photograph monuments of historical, artistic value, ethnographic subjects and folkloristic objects; b) gather, collect and exchange photographs with similar organizations; c) generate and preserve photographs from excursions, illustrating the social life of the organization and its activities; and, d) provide photographic training and circulate photographic publicity materials. The result of a collaborative research with Marta Ziętkiewicz, the paper discusses the origins of the Landkentnish movement, the photographic sources and resources it created, the exhibitions it put on display, and its employment of snapshots and illustrated magazines. Drawing on extensive archival research and surveys of the movement’s surviving publications, the study demonstrates how photography assisted the movement in contesting Polish historical amnesia by evincing the deep-rooted historical connection between the Jewish community of Poland and the Polish land.
Biography:
Gil Pasternak is Reader in Social and Political Photographic Cultures in the Photographic History Research Centre (PHRC) at De Montfort University (UK). His research investigates intersections of photography with sociopolitical realities and cultural heritage practices, especially in Israeli society and the histories of Polish Jewry from the interwar to the post-communist era. Currently finalizing a monograph on Israel’s sociopolitical photographic cultures and a special issue on late- and post-communist political photographic practices in the (former) Eastern Bloc (with Marta Ziętkiewicz), he previously completed The Handbook of Photography Studies (Bloomsbury 2019), Visioning Israel-Palestine: Encounters at the Cultural Boundaries of Conflict (Bloomsbury 2019) and Visual Conflicts: On the Formation of Political Memory in the History of Art and Visual Cultures (CSP 2011; with Paul Fox). In 2017 Gil established the DigiCONFLICT research consortium that secured a large European Commission research grant to explore uses of digital heritage in zones of cultural conflict.
Photography and Resistance 