Icons

We all recognize photo-icons. Those pictures are automatically linked with certain epoque and author – usually important for the history of photography. But this feeling refers not just to those historical and widely recognized pictures. I think we all have pictures which are for any reason important to us – personally. Those pictures became icons for each of us, individually. Seeing those pictures we feel butterflies in stomach, something switches automatically also in our minds.

Dorothea Lange, "Migrant Mother"

Recently I started to see something worrying. Those icons faded away with time. The same I feel about their authors. As they were always far away, unreachable for me. Maybe it is a mixture of my complexes, especially today, when the author is still alive you can just post an email, and then you know that from the other side there is sitting a man like me, but usually more busy.For many it is perhaps obvious, but I need something that will recall those icons in my head. All of those great photographers we admire today they were also starting one day. They were making their first pictures, then participating in bigger and smaller photographic projects. Recently, one of such a reminders came into my hands.

The picture comes from the book: "Poland, 1946 - The Photographs and Letters of John Vachon"

Vachon was one of photographers working for FSA - Farm Security Administration. In 1946 he went to Poland to picture first months of after-war Poland. The book is a selection of his pictures and most of all private letters he was writing to his wife Penny. At the picture we see his family (from the left): daughter Ann, his mother Ann, wife Penny and son Brian. In the background pictures of Dorothea Lange and Jack Delano, divided perhaps by the picture of one of the kids.

At my room I also have such a place space where there is and will be lots of pictures made by my friends. I wish them to became great photographers. But at the same time they will be my friends. All that thinking lead me to the conclusion that you have to do that what you feel and just throw away the complexes.

Thanks for translation from polish by Marcin Gorski.