/photographs from the collection of the BCC/LZC’s Media Gallery
exhibition opening 11.17.2017 (Friday), 6 PM – 8 PM
the exhibition is open until 12.29.2017
Białystok in the Decades is an exhibition of archival photographs of the city and its inhabitants in the 20th century from the collection of the BCC/LZC Media Gallery – a multimedia archive of the oral history of the city and its area. This is just a small piece of a huge collection of photos that we have been able to collect in the last seven years. The photos that were shared with us by the citizens of Białystok themselves. It is neither a complete picture of the city and its inhabitants, nor of the changes taking place in its structure. Nevertheless, for the purposes of the exhibition, we tried to select the photographs representative of the time period. They are more like snapshots, images of people witch the changing urban landscape in the background. Seemingly, quite accidental situations, the views of the city itself, captured in the span of over 70 years, however, very typical of most of the photographs of those times, carefully kept in family albums. We can see there the inhabitants during, among other things, the widely understood free time, seemingly normal life during the Second World War, the reconstruction and expansion of the city, Labour Day marches, the demonstrations of the 1980s, all with the changing landscape of the city in the background. Many of the presented photographs tell stories about the people, who made it available to us, or the people, who are depicted in them. This is the world, that lives in memories, personal relationships recorded for the BCC/LZC Media Gallery. Photos and memories are inextricably linked. In order to fully understand and experience them, you should immerse yourself in these stories about the old Białystok and its inhabitants, what we encourage you to do.
The photographs show the city since independence until the late 1980s. These are the dates that open and end epochs. In both cases, Poles, including the inhabitants of Białystok, regained freedom. In the first case, literally, in the second case, symbolically. The beginning of the 1990s was also the twilight of a certain era in photography, the entry of the colour photography, shortly thereafter, digital one. But it’s a completely different story. Let’s look at the old Białystok and its inhabitants together.
