Polska Britannica

The photographs show wedding receptions in parish halls, cigarettes smoked outside church after Mass, men dancing the oberek, communions and long afternoons spent drinking tea. Nearby are children asleep on sofa beds, lace tablecloths and holy pictures in gilded frames hanging on the walls. The faces look strangely familiar — scenes that could easily be mistaken for post-war Poland, except that everything is unfolding in the English Midlands of the 1970s. “Apart from the occasional Ford Cortina, it is hard to believe these photographs were even taken in Britain,” wrote Martin Parr. “People often told us that traditions in Poland were no longer as strong as they were in our community. That life in Poland no longer looked like this,” says the photographer himself, Czesław Siegieda, whose images seem suspended between two worlds.

Siegieda photographed a world that was largely invisible at the time to British society: the Polish diaspora, formed mostly by people, who had arrived in Britain alongside Anders’ Army, and after the war chose not to return to communist Poland. He himself came from such a family. He spent the first four years of his life in the barracks of a displaced persons camp for Poles in Leicestershire. Later, his school friends had no idea that he spoke another language at home. He grew up suspended between two worlds.

Chance also played its part in the development of his photographic practice. The local Polish Parish priest, who became a lodger in Siegieda’s household, regularly visited Polish families and invited “the boy with the camera” to community gatherings and celebrations. This gave Siegieda access to moments that would have remained closed to an outsider. To avoid drawing attention, he covered the shiny parts of his camera with black tape. Some of the photographs recall the work of Zofia Rydet — intimate records of a disappearing world captured from within.

The photographs eventually became Siegieda’s graduation project as a photography student. The work quickly attracted attention and following an exhibition at the renowned Half Moon Gallery in London was due to tour across Britain. But after a showing in his home town it became clear that for many of the people portrayed, public visibility was still bound up with distrust and fears of deportation. Siegieda put the archive away for more than forty years. Only after his mother’s death in 2016 did he decide the time had come to tell this story. Martin Parr later discovered Siegieda’s website and helped promote the work, deeply impressed by what he found. In 2020, the book Polska Britannica was published and later featured in publications including The Guardian.

Siegieda’s photographs were shown in Poland for the first time during last year’s Fotofestiwal – International Festival of Photography in Łódź. The exhibition at Instytut Fotografii Fort will be the artist’s first solo presentation in the country and the first opportunity to meet him in Poland in more than half a century. Signed copies of Polska Britannica will be available from the institute bookshop.