Shaping Memory through Visuality

Abstract

This article focuses on war photography as a cultural phenomenon as used in secondary school history textbooks in the context of post-1989 Poland. It argues that the focus on the Second World War, its military aspects, and the threads previously erased from public memory, was specific to the Polish context. It also proves that the visuality of Polish textbooks after 1989 tends to correspond with the broader Western iconosphere as a result of political and cultural transformation. The mechanisms of visual communication underpinning these tendencies consist in several overlapping layers of experiencing and perceiving photography, such as studium, punctum (Roland Barthes), and spectrality (Michel de Certeau, Maciej Bugajewski). The article also postulates a visual literacy that holistically considers all of these aspects.