Andrzej Górski
The sound of gunfire echoes in the distance. The noise carries easily through the canvas walls of the tent where I’ve set up a makeshift darkroom to process photographs using the wet collodion technique. Such mobile darkrooms only became part of a photographer’s equipment in the 1850s, since the earlier era of daguerreotypes involved a development process far too complex to be carried out outside the studio.
Why There Are No Photographs of the Uprising: Five Collapsible Darkrooms
In 1855, when Roger Fenton, a British portraitist associated with Queen Victoria’s court, arrived in Crimea to photograph the war, he rented a cart in Sevastopol from a local wine merchant. Funded by a British publisher, he outfitted it with five collapsible darkrooms, thirty-six crates of photographic chemicals, and seven hundred glass plates.
In the 21st century, my own collodion photography setup consists of three wooden crates holding fifty plates, two more filled with chemicals, two bellows cameras, and the aforementioned darkroom tent. The creation of this kit was made possible by a grant from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.
Ahead of the 150th anniversary of the January Uprising, I began to investigate why no photographs of battles or skirmishes from this revolt have survived. After all, Fenton had successfully documented the Crimean War ten years prior to the uprising. A decade is a long time in the history of photographic technology. During that period, Maksymilian Strasz translated the instructions for the collodion process into Polish, and portrait studios were already operating in major cities.
Using the same tools and methods, I set out to visit places associated with the insurrection.
The Smell of Gunpowder and Ether
In the first three months of the January Uprising, only one in five insurgents had access to firearms. That number had risen to one in three by spring, and two-thirds were armed with military-grade rifles by autumn. At the time, Western European countries were mass-producing weapons for the ongoing American Civil War. The 19th century witnessed extraordinary progress – in the technology of both preserving human likenesses and killing.
The collodion process, developed by Gustave Le Gray and Frederick Scott Archer, made it possible to prepare light-sensitive materials outside the studio, allowing photographers to venture into the field. This process used nitrocellulose, derived from cotton exposed to nitric and sulfuric acids. Had the chemical reaction continued only slightly longer, it would have produced guncotton – a key component of gunpowder. The collodion solution (nitrocellulose dissolved in ether and alcohol) was mixed with bromide and iodide salts; the sharp scent of gunpowder mingled with the sweet, chemical aroma of ether.
In the 19th century, one of the more prosperous branches of artisanal photography was post-mortem portraiture, in which the deceased were portrayed as if merely asleep. On February 27, 1860, in Warsaw, Russian imperial troops opened fire on a crowd during a chaotic attempt to suppress a patriotic demonstration, discharging fifty-five rounds. Five people were killed. The youngest victim’s body was laid in his parents’ apartment in Zamoyski Palace. The others were placed in Room 64 of the Hotel Europejski, which also housed the photographic studio of Karol Beyer. Post-mortem images of the fallen, their wounds clearly visible, were reproduced by the thousands and circulated across all the partitioned territories of Poland. The anger of the Polish people only grew.
A Policy Against Oblivion
Ether ignites at just 45 degrees Celsius. A single spark is enough to set it aflame. Just seconds after the ether evaporates from the glass plate coated with emulsion, the plate must be placed in a bath of silver nitrate dissolved in water. Not knowing what awaited me outside the tent, I waited, holding the plate until it was ready. The tension mounted.
The spark that accelerated the outbreak of the uprising was news of forced conscription into the Tsarist army. On their way to join insurgent units, many volunteers stopped at photographers’ studios.
The photographs taken at the time on black glass were known as ambrotypes, from the Greek word ambros, meaning “immortal”. In this way, insurgents acquired a peculiar kind of “policy against oblivion” – a promise of remembrance that only photography could offer.
In April 1863, in Kraków, a group of fifteen insurgents from the so-called “Zouaves of Death” gathered behind the studio of Walery Rzewuski. In the courtyard, they posed for four photographs showing them plucking geese, peeling potatoes, and eating a meal. The low sensitivity of the photographic emulsion forced them to remain motionless for several seconds, giving the images a theatrical quality. Only the goose appeared post mortem…
What Did the Fighters See?
Between 1861 and 1862, Karol Beyer spent over six months imprisoned in the Modlin fortress for photographing patriotic demonstrations – among other reasons. After the uprising began in 1863, he continued photographing for a few months, but in October of that year he was arrested and exiled to Novokhopersk in the Voronezh Governorate. As for the aforementioned Walery Rzewuski, he and his brother arrived at Langiewicz’s insurgent camp in March 1863 and spent two days there. What did he do? Did he take any photographs? We do not know. I checked Kraków’s historical weather records: in March 1863, snow was falling, and the entire month was cold. When taking photographs in winter, I had to heat my bottles of chemicals over a fire. When I set up my darkroom next to the execution site near Choroszcz, outside Białystok, snowflakes froze on the glass plate in my hand.
From dawn to dusk on September 17, 1862, the Battle of Antietam raged – the bloodiest single-day battle in U.S. history. Twenty-three thousand soldiers were killed or wounded. The number of bullets fired was equally staggering, and lead from the spent rounds still contaminates the environment today. In her project Deep South, which captivated me as much as the insurgents’ own accounts, American photographer Sally Mann documented Civil War battlefields. In some images, the horizon is framed by trees deformed by toxins. Her photographs appear degraded, intentionally mirroring the destruction of 150 years ago. The collodion process – vulnerable to temperature shifts, dust, and emulsion damage – became a visual analogue for historical decay. Visiting sites of insurgent clashes in the Knyszyńska Forest, I tried to spot features in the landscape that the fighters themselves might have seen: ancient trees and forest streams, whose contours remain unchanged by time.
At Piereciosy clearing, 400 volunteers gathered. Thirty were killed in battle, their bodies buried in a mass grave. Russian forces seized wagons full of food and silver rubles. Two weeks later, as Ignacy Abramowicz recalled, the place still reeked of death: rags and scraps of paper littered the ground, marked by the tracks of men and horses. The stench was unbearable. In one spot, a dead horse lay rotting, a crow circling above, cawing. In many places, trees had been freshly notched where bullets had been dug out.
Death was dealt up close, too – by scythe, lance, or even club. The fighters saw each other’s faces in brutal proximity.
A Dozen Cossacks Felled with a Wagon Shaft…
Have these eyes seen the Tsar? Roland Barthes, looking at a portrait of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jérôme, once wondered whether those eyes had looked upon the Emperor himself. When we gaze into the portraits of Russian officers, can we help but wonder whether the reflections in their eyes reveal General Muravyov “the Wieszatiel” [the Hangman], or perhaps even the Tsar? Barthes wrote: Perhaps there is within us an unshakable resistance to believing in the past, in History, beyond the mythic form. Photography abolishes that resistance: from now on, the past is as certain as the present; what we see on paper is as certain as what we touch.
Photographs and text: Andrzej Górski
Andrzej Górski is a graduate of the Polish National Film, Television and Theatre School in Łódź, and the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava; he is a member of the Association of Polish Art Photographers. Since 2010, he has specialised in 19th-century photographic techniques. In 2013, using a century-old camera, he launched a documentary project titled How People Travelled in the 19th Century. The maritime segment of the project was shot aboard Poland’s largest training sailing ships: Dar Młodzieży, Zawisza Czarny, and Kapitan Borchardt. Together with Maciej Rant and Tomasz Adamski, he co-created the project The Dreamt-Up History of Cinema in Podlasie. He currently teaches photography at the Białystok Center for Education and the Youth Cultural Center in Białystok.
Translated by Sylwia Szarejko.