Semiotics of Visual Memory: Photographs by Zbigniew Zielonacki of Poznań at the end of the Second World War and their Afterlife in Postwar Decades

• In Event: Layers of (Audio)Visual Memory and the Second World War in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

Zbigniew Zielonacki was one of the most famous Poznań photojournalists and photographers of the 20th century, who managed to document the last months of the second world war in Poznań, creating a visual tale that has been “imprinted” in the visual memory of subsequent generations of Poznań inhabitants and still prompts lively discussions. This paper will analyze both the visual narrative of this collection of photographs, with the use of the methodological tools of semiotics, as well as it will pay attention to the ruptures and spaces for beyond-cultural experience of the visual memory they hold. At the same time - in order to answer the questions about the ways visual memory of traumatic events work in evolving local communities - it will look at this narrative as located at the intersection of local, national and transnational contexts, with all the meanings that are either maintained, adapted, or that shift in the flux of the political and cultural realities of the last 80 years.

Author

• Anna Topolska, Independent Scholar