The album "Archiwtektura Henryka Nahorskiego" is archival photos of modernist architecture of Bydgoszcz and the region by Henryk Nahorski. The photography team contains unique and rich iconographic documentation, which is a valuable material for analyzing the history and transformations of post-war Polish modernist architecture and urban planning.
When I met Mrs. Elżbieta, widow of the photographer Henryk Nahorski, who died in 2012, for the first time and heard about his photographic archive, Jerzy Lewczyński and his definition of the archeology of photography came to my mind: I call archeology the activities of discovering photography , researching and commenting on events, facts and situations that used to take place in the so-called photographic past. Thanks to photography, the continuity of visual contact with the past creates opportunities for expanding the impact of former culture-forming layers on today's.
In 2016, Ms. Elżbieta visited the Foundation once again as a participant in a workshop on digitization and archiving of photographs as part of the Vintage Photo Festival. Then she brought with her dozens of negatives on a variety of topics: from reports of social events for CAF, through photos of Toruń Gothic to family photos, saying in jokes that he would probably destroy them, because he does not know what to do with them and nobody wants them.
Among this arbitrary archival collection, I was able to recognize the repetitive style of great shots of the modernist architecture of the region, which I immediately recognized as an example of the today fashionable subspecies architecture porn. Since then I have been looking for a way to save these photographs from destruction and oblivion. After a year of hard work, we managed to organize an exhibition crowning these efforts.
– Katarzyna Gębarowska
Henryk Nahorski was born on January 10, 1939 in the Eastern Borderlands. Roman Robaczewski recalls: "The great love for him was the art of photography, as evidenced by the fact that the money he received from his mother for layette for his just-born daughter Ewa, without the knowledge of his wife, he spent on buying a Kiev camera. The main change in his life came when he acquired the first <professional> camera. Photography became his passion, he remained faithful to him for the rest of his life. Despite his successes in photography, confirmed by admission to the Bydgoszcz Photographic Society, he did not devote his entire life to it, since from 1973 he became professionally involved in tourist publishing houses. He published dozens of maps and city plans from the Kuyavian-Pomeranian region, numerous tourist brochures, etc. He became the unquestioned authority in this respect. Bydgoszcz alone owes him eleven editions of city plans. Henryk Nahorski, rather nostalgic, romantic, indifferent to mundane matters, with the artist's mind and soul.