Photographic Plates of Memory: Marian Kołodziej’s Return to the Labyrinth

The author discusses the artist’s need to create work representative of his memories of five years in concentration camps in Poland and Germany during the Second World War. Through the poetry and prose of Polish poets Zbigniew Herbert and Adam Zagajewski she explores the artist’s rehabilitative journey to create depictions of his traumatic memories, which began at age seventy-two after a major stroke. Did the artist in fact create an aesthetic in representing the violence and death of the camps? She also analyzes the artist’s late work through an ethical framework, suggesting that in this case the depiction of traumatic memories is art that issues its viewers an ethical mandate to contemplate both the detrimental and potentially rehabilitative effects of rendering violent historical events