Tomasz Szersze

Dream Photography

Dream Photography is a combination of two exhibitions that took place in Warsaw in 2012
and 2015 Histories of Cinema and Other Stories (Asymetria Gallery, 2015) and You. Me.
Things (Archeology of Photography Foundation, 2012). What probably joins these works
together is a fascination with the idea of the afterimage, montage and, as a consequence, of
what we could call potentiality. I strongly believe that history (also our own history) is open
for the constant rereading and that what never happened (but potentially could) have the same
importance as what happens in reality. Photography could be an excellent tool to explore
those side-paths of reality: melting pot where past and future, existing and non-existing are
combined together, where history meets with dreams
Concerning Histories of Cinema and Other Stories the starting point for that project was JeanLuc Godards monumental film essay Histoire(s) du cinma and the question: where does our
private history of cinema and the life after life of film images begin? And is it not so that
film images, freed from their context, immobilized in the form of a picture, photograph, or
film still become something that we could defined as dream photography? Godard argues
that cinema produces images that live their own life and are autonomous from the film
narratives of which they are a part. Thus open up to other stories, to the potential life after
life that interacts with other films, images and their afterimages What I do in my Histories
of Cinema and Other Stories is further development of the history of the cinema / cinematic
stories. The intertwining stories address both the question of history, as well as, most of all,
the private, even intimate use of film images and photographs. The problem of memory and
non-memory, fetishism (a particular kind of love for the cinema) and ones own history are
combined here in a kind of personal, ephemeral photo-theatre, where film characters play the
main roles.
The second project, You. Me. Things, analyze the aesthetic of Sixties: its seducing
aestheticism hiding consumerism, which like in Georges Perecs novel Things: a Story of
the Sixties [Les choses: Une histoire des annes soixante] ties and sometimes destroys. The
project is a kind of visual archeology of that period, where remains of the images taken from
the magazines subvert old meanings and create a new ones. The historic source for that

montages is Polish magazine You and Me the very specific one, because in the period of
sixties in the communist Poland it tries to promote the Western way of living, seducing by
beautiful images and promise of better live. It is also a kind of utopian (so impossible) story,
rearranged Polish iconography of dreams, iconography of dreams from Sixties
The last, autonomous work entitled Tristes tropiques is a reminiscence of the exotic voyage.
Another kind of dream, an afterimage, born from the clash of two different photographic
realities.

Tomasz Szersze (born 1981) is a photographer, visual artist and art historian based in
Warsaw, Poland. A graduate of the Photography Department of Film School in d and
Warsaw University, granted a Ph.D. degree in art history. His works were shown, among
others, in Muzeum Sztuki in d, Galeria Asymetria in Warsaw, Fundacja Archeologia
Fotografii in Warsaw, Nowy Teatr in Warsaw, Muzeum Mickiewicza (Mickiewicz Msesi) in
Istanbul, Galerie Anne de Villepoix in Paris, Salone Internationale del Mobile in Milano as
well as on Paris Photo. He is also an author of a book Travelers without map and passport
(2015) devoted to the French writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris and to the question of
surrealist photography. He is also a member of editorial staff of View. Theories and Practices
of Visual Culture and Konteksty quarterly. He is represented by Asymetria Gallery in
Warsaw. More works on: tomaszszerszen.com