Tadeusz Rolke's portrait of his friend, photojournalist Eustachy Kossakowski, with a girl named Matylda. Kossakowski is sitting on an Italian Lambretta scooter – an unattainable luxury for most citizens of the Polish People's Republic at the time. His nonchalant pose and a gaze hidden behind sunglasses create an aura of an elegant lady-killer. Both he and the shyly smiling girl in a flared dress and a blouse with an op-art pattern appear meticulously styled in accordance with the newest fashion trends of the time. They could be strolling the streets of Paris or Milan. Only the awareness of the material and aesthetic poverty of the communist capital, still undergoing reconstruction after the damages inflicted by war, brings to attention the full context contained in this photo.
In the words of art critic Adam Mazur, “the sight of a photographer and elegant youths posing was a rarity in rough-hewn and ruined Warsaw. More than reality, Rolke's photograph depicts the dreams of the generation that grew up after the war; dreams of a lifestyle very different from the standards of socialism. Despite formal similarities with contemporaneous photographs made in a similar style in the West, it is something more – a manifesto of a generation”. “That is what this photograph is” – wrote art critic Joanna Kinowska – “more an icon of style, fashion, a particular time and memory than a regular icon of a photo – a document, a testimony, an important and groundbreaking shot”.
Due to the black-and-white frame, clothes, or even Kossakowski blonde hair, the photograph may call to mind another manifesto of this generation – Andrzej Wajda's movie Niewinni czarodzieje (Innocent sorcerers), released in the same year: 1960.
Source:
Mazur Adam, Tadeusz Rolke, „Eustachy i Matylda”, Culture.pl 2014, http://culture.pl/pl/dzielo/tadeusz-rolke-eustachy-i-matylda
