Szlachetna Inicjatywa 2009: One Negative, Many Photographs

An experiment that anticipated the question of the image after photography

Some art projects remain closely tied to the moment in which they were created. Others acquire a different meaning when the questions surrounding them change.

Szlachetna Inicjatywa (The Noble Initiative), presented in Warsaw in 2009, belongs to the latter category. At the time, its premise was deliberately simple: a photograph by Jerzy Lewczyński was made available to a group of artists working with historical and noble photographic processes, who were asked to create their own interpretations of the same image. The exhibition was held at Galeria Obok ZPAF from 25 November to 30 December 2009.

Seen today, however, the project can be understood as something much more than an exhibition devoted to alternative photographic techniques.

It was an experiment in the identity of the photographic image.

The question it posed in practical form was remarkably close to debates that have become central to contemporary photography:

What happens to an image when it passes through different hands, different processes, and different material forms?

One Angel

The starting point was Jerzy Lewczyński's photograph of an angel figure photographed in Sławięcice. The image was made in the 1960s, among the deteriorating buildings of a former state agricultural farm. Some years later, the place had changed, and the figure itself had been restored and given a new harp. The photograph, however, preserved an earlier state of the site.

The catalogue places this transformation in the context of André Bazin's famous idea of photography as a medium that preserves the past. It also quotes Andrzej Pytliński, who points out that photographs made for apparently ordinary or accidental purposes can later become extraordinarily important historical documents. Photographs of Warsaw, for example, were used in reconstructing parts of Krakowskie Przedmieście after the destruction of the Second World War.

Lewczyński's photograph had already undergone one transformation of status: from a photograph made in a particular place and time into a document of a world that was later altered.

Szlachetna Inicjatywa gave it another life.

The photograph was no longer used simply as a document.

It became material for new works.

The archaeologist of photography becomes the source

The choice of Lewczyński was not accidental.

The catalogue explicitly draws attention to the paradox: an artist who frequently worked with found or pre-existing photographic material now became the source of an image appropriated and transformed by other photographers.

This is more than a clever conceptual gesture.

Lewczyński was one of the key figures associated with what in Poland became known as the archaeology of photography: the recovery, recontextualization and creative reactivation of existing photographs, negatives and archival material.

Szlachetna Inicjatywa applied that logic to one of Lewczyński's own images.

The project therefore created a kind of loop:

Lewczyński worked with other people's photographic traces → his own image became material for other artists → his negative became the starting point for further reinterpretations.

Archaeology was applied to the archaeology of photography itself.

The one-negative experiment

The structure of the project was deliberately controlled. A large-format negative was copied into one hundred copies and distributed to photographers around the world who worked with historical photographic processes. The intention was to present different methods of reproducing and interpreting the same image.

This simplicity gave the project its analytical power.

One element remained constant:

the source image.

Everything else could change:

the maker, the process, the material, the degree of intervention and the resulting object.

In this sense, the exhibition functioned almost like an artistic experiment.

One image became the common matrix.

Different artists were then allowed to run that image through different processes.

The result was not a collection of identical copies.

It was a collection of different answers to the same image.

The same image, different material existences

The final pages of the catalogue make this particularly clear. The Angel appears in a remarkable range of forms: gum bichromate, toned cyanotype, platinum, oil, salt print, gold, albumen, Vandyke, carbo, ozotype, Chiba system and other processes.

The differences are not limited to colour.

They concern:

surface

contrast

tonal structure

matte or glossy appearance

edges

emulsion application

and, in some cases, the image itself, through additional drawing or manual interventions.

Mariusz Kubielas makes an especially important observation: because every artist worked from the same negative, the project made it possible to see differences in both technical and mental individuality. He points to brush and roller marks, variations in surface, and additional interventions that changed the character of the image.

This is one of the project's strongest insights.

The process was not simply a way of printing the image.

The process became a way of interpreting the image.

From copy to interpretation

This raises the central problem.

Are these works copies of Lewczyński's photograph?

At one level, yes: they retain the same visual source.

At another level, no: materially, they are different objects.

At the artistic level, they can be understood as interpretations.

The catalogue's text by Mariusz Kubielas makes precisely this point. Because the same negative was used, the individual character of each artist becomes visible through the material result. Differences in the application of the photographic emulsion, surface, gloss, texture and additional interventions produce distinct versions of the image.

This leads to an important proposition:

the identity of the image cannot be reduced to the identity of the photographic object.

The image can remain recognizably the same while its material realization changes radically.

That distinction has become central to contemporary photographic theory. W. J. T. Mitchell's Picture Theory, for example, insists on the need to think about pictures not merely as transparent carriers of meaning but as objects with their own modes of material and cultural existence. (University of Chicago Press)

Elizabeth Edwards has developed a related argument from the perspective of material culture, insisting that photographs cannot be understood through visual content alone: their meaning also emerges through their physical presence, placement, use, tactility and social relations. (Annual Reviews)

What these theories articulate conceptually, Szlachetna Inicjatywa had already tested practically.

The print becomes an act of authorship

In much conventional photographic thinking, the image is considered primary and the printing process secondary.

The logic of Szlachetna Inicjatywa is different.

With historical processes such as gum bichromate, the final appearance of the work depends upon decisions made after exposure: preparation, pigment, coating, washing, brushing, layering and timing.

The negative does not determine the final object completely.

The photographer therefore becomes an author again, after the photograph has already been taken.

This is one of the reasons why the project is so relevant to current research on alternative photographic processes. The process is not merely technical infrastructure.

It is part of the meaning of the work.

The most important event happened outside the gallery

Perhaps the most valuable piece of information in the catalogue concerns something that was not originally planned.

After the project had begun, works started arriving from artists who had never received a negative directly from the organizer. It turned out that participants had begun passing the negative onward to other artists, creating what the catalogue calls a kind of "chain."

This changed the nature of the project.

The original structure was:

organizer → participant.

It became:

organizer → participant → participant → participant…

The project began to develop a life of its own.

The catalogue explicitly notes that the initiator lost control over the routes taken by the negative, but that this loss of control produced something perhaps more significant: spontaneous and genuine interest extending beyond the originally planned circle of participants.

Today, this can be read as a remarkably early example of networked image transmission through a physical medium.

There was no social media infrastructure.

There was no cloud.

There was no file sharing.

The network was created by a physical object moving from person to person.

The negative as a carrier of an idea

At this point, the negative ceased to be merely a photographic technical component.

It became a carrier of an idea.

It travelled between artists.

Each new recipient transformed it.

The physical negative therefore functioned simultaneously as:

image matrix,

archival trace,

production tool,

medium of transmission,

and link between artists.

This is a crucial point for the contemporary idea of image transmission.

Transmission does not necessarily mean sending an unchanged image from one place to another.

In this project, transmission meant allowing an image to be transformed while retaining its identity as a recognizable source.

The act of transmission itself generated difference.

From Koniec epoki to Szlachetna Inicjatywa

The catalogue places the project within an earlier stage of the artist's practice. Before Szlachetna Inicjatywa, there was Koniec epoki, based on old glass negatives from the archive of Edward Janusz and interpreted using gum bichromate.

The difference between the two projects is crucial.

In Koniec epoki:

archival negative → contemporary artist → reinterpretation.

In Szlachetna Inicjatywa:

negative → many artists → many interpretations.

The scale changed.

The archive ceased to be merely a source for an artist.

It became a social process.

This distinction is important because it turns an archival gesture into a study of circulation.

Why use historical processes at all?

The catalogue asks a question that remains highly relevant.

For historical Pictorialists, alternative processes had very concrete reasons. They could help establish photography's status as art, and they offered forms of tonal and surface control unavailable or difficult to achieve with the materials of their time.

By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, those reasons had largely disappeared.

Photography no longer needed to prove that it was art.

Digital technology could provide levels of tonal control and reproducibility that nineteenth-century photographers could hardly imagine.

So why spend days making a single print when the image could be produced in seconds?

The catalogue gives several answers:

the pleasure of making,

experimentation,

the aura of manual processes,

play,

uniqueness,

the unusual character of handmade work

and a resistance to a world of ready-made solutions.

That was an accurate diagnosis of 2009.

But the question has become even more radical in 2026.

From digital photography to generative images

In 2009, the principal challenge was the speed and perfection of digital reproduction.

Today there is another level to the problem.

Generative AI can produce images without a camera, negative, photographic emulsion or conventional photographic exposure.

The contemporary question therefore becomes:

Why physically materialize an image that an algorithm can generate almost instantaneously in an almost unlimited number of variations?

This is where the old project becomes unexpectedly contemporary.

Material processes introduce:

time

limits

embodied labour

resistance

accident

surface

and uniqueness.

The issue is no longer simply whether one technology produces a better image than another.

It is whether they produce different kinds of photographic existence.

Szlachetna Inicjatywa and the problem of authorship

The project also divided authorship into several levels.

Jerzy Lewczyński created the original photograph and negative.

Grzegorz Gorczyński created the artistic situation that enabled the circulation of the negative.

The participating artists created the individual material realizations.

None of these levels can be fully separated from the others.

The resulting object is therefore the product of a distributed authorship, even though the participants were not collaborating in the conventional sense.

This becomes particularly interesting in relation to current AI-based image production.

Suppose an algorithm generates an image, a human artist transforms it, and a historical photographic process turns it into a physical object.

Who is the author?

The 2009 project offers an analogue version of the same structural problem.

The question was already present in a purely photographic environment.

One image does not necessarily mean one artwork

This is perhaps the deepest implication of the project.

There is one source image.

There are many physical objects.

But does that mean there are many artworks?

Or many realizations of one artwork?

The catalogue does not resolve this.

That is not a weakness.

It is exactly what makes the project useful today.

The same distinction appears in contemporary discussions of photographic objects: an image can remain identifiable across multiple material manifestations, while those manifestations may acquire different meanings and different institutional statuses.

This is one reason why the distinction between image, object and artwork is increasingly useful.

A physical network of alternative photography

The international dimension of the project is also important. The catalogue lists participants from Poland, Germany, the United States, Portugal, South Africa, Belgium, Italy and the United Kingdom.

This demonstrates that the use of historical photographic processes already operated as a transnational network in 2009.

The important thing is not simply that artists from different countries took part.

The crucial point is that they shared materials, processes, knowledge and artistic situations.

This is precisely what contemporary research into the ecosystem of alternative photography needs to recover.

The ecosystem does not consist only of artworks.

It includes:

people

materials

knowledge

techniques

organizations

exhibitions

publications

workshops

and networks of transmission.

The catalogue as a historical document

The catalogue therefore deserves to be treated as more than documentation of an old exhibition.

It is a primary source for the history of contemporary alternative photography.

It records what the participants were doing, which processes they used, how the project was understood at the time, how the negative circulated, and how the relationship between historical processes and contemporary digital technology was being conceptualized.

It also reveals the vocabulary of the period.

That is important.

A 2009 document should not be silently rewritten in today's theoretical language.

We can interpret it through contemporary concepts such as materiality, distributed authorship or image transmission, but those concepts are our analytical tools, not necessarily the language of the original project.

This distinction matters if the material is to become part of a serious research archive.

An experiment that anticipated its own theory

Looking back, Szlachetna Inicjatywa can be seen as an artistic experiment that anticipated questions that have become increasingly important in contemporary photography.

It explored:

one image and many material realizations;

the relationship between negative and final object;

the role of process in authorship;

the circulation of photographic material;

the distinction between copy and interpretation;

the tension between image identity and object identity;

and the possibility of a photographic work having several authors at different stages of its existence.

These issues are not identical to the theoretical problems raised today, but the structural relationship is striking.

From Lewczyński to “Transmisja obrazu”

This is why the current reactivation of the project under the title “Transmisja obrazu. Eksperyment fotograficzny 2009–2026” can be understood as more than a reconstruction.

In the original project, the experiment was:

one negative → many artists → many processes → many objects.

The contemporary version can ask a broader question:

What happens when the same image enters a contemporary photographic ecosystem shaped by digital photography, historical processes, online networks and generative AI?

The point is not to reproduce 2009.

The point is to make the passage of time itself part of the experiment.

What has changed?

The technologies.

The platforms.

The language.

The market.

The institutions.

The meaning of the original.

The status of the photographic object.

But perhaps one thing has not changed:

the desire to find out what happens to an image when another person takes responsibility for it.

From Pictorialism to the image after photography

Historical Pictorialism asked:

Can photography become art?

Szlachetna Inicjatywa asked a different question:

What happens when an existing photograph is handed over to other processes and other authors?

Contemporary practice can push the question further:

What happens when the same image moves between camera, negative, historical process, digital manipulation, algorithmic generation and physical object?

This is the terrain I describe as the image after photography.

The term does not mean the end of photography.

It describes a situation in which photography is no longer necessarily the final state of the image.

The historical importance of a simple idea

Perhaps the most striking thing about the catalogue is how simple the original gesture was.

One image.

One negative.

Many artists.

Many processes.

Many objects.

Yet that simplicity exposed a surprisingly complex structure.

The same image could remain recognizably itself and simultaneously become materially different.

A negative could remain the source of the image and yet fail to determine its final form.

A copy could become an interpretation.

A technical process could become an artistic act.

A physical negative could become a network connecting artists.

And an exhibition of one photograph could become an exhibition of difference.

That is why the catalogue deserves to be revisited today.

The project did not predict digital culture or generative AI.

But it identified a problem that remains unresolved:

If an image can be transmitted, transformed and materialized repeatedly by different authors, where exactly does the identity of the photographic work reside?

Perhaps not in the negative alone.

Perhaps not in the print.

Perhaps not even in the image considered abstractly.

Perhaps it lies in the continuity of the image through its transformations.

Seen in this way, Szlachetna Inicjatywa was not simply a 2009 exhibition of historical photographic techniques.

It was an early experiment in image transmission — long before that term acquired its present technological associations.

And that is precisely why it deserves a second life in the context of “Transmisja obrazu. Eksperyment fotograficzny 2009–2026.”

References

[1] Szlachetna Inicjatywa. Wystawa zdjęcia Jerzego Lewczyńskiego w interpretacji twórców posługujących się zabytkowymi technikami fotograficznymi, Galeria Obok ZPAF, Warszawa, 2009. Exhibition dates: 25 November–30 December 2009.

[2] Mariusz Kubielas, Paradoks projektu Gorczyńskiego, czyli poliglotyczny monolog, fragment included in the exhibition catalogue. The essay discusses the history of Lewczyński's image, the logic of the project and the differences among the resulting interpretations.

[3] The catalogue describes the distribution of one large-format negative, copied into one hundred copies and sent to artists working with historical photographic processes.

[4] The list of participating artists and processes documents an international field extending beyond Poland to Germany, the United States, Portugal, South Africa, Belgium, Italy and the United Kingdom.

[5] Catalogue documentation of the individual realizations includes gum bichromate, toned cyanotype, platinum, oil print, salt print, gold print, albumen, Vandyke, carbo, ozotype and the Chiba system, among others.

[6] The catalogue records the unplanned circulation of the negative beyond the original group of participants and describes the resulting "chain" of transmission.

[7] The catalogue places Szlachetna Inicjatywa in continuity with the earlier project Koniec epoki, based on glass negatives from the Edward Janusz archive and interpreted through gum bichromate.

[8] The catalogue discusses motivations for contemporary use of historical photographic processes, including pleasure in making, experimentation, manual work, uniqueness and resistance to ready-made photographic production.

[9] Elizabeth Edwards, “Objects of Affect: Photography Beyond the Image,” Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012): 221–234. Edwards argues for understanding photographs through their material, sensory and social relations rather than visual content alone. (Annual Reviews)

[10] W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, University of Chicago Press, 1994. The volume develops a theory of pictures as objects within relations between visual and verbal representation and includes a substantial discussion of photographic essays. (University of Chicago Press)

[11] The catalogue's interpretations of the same negative as a source of materially different original-like objects provide an early practical case for contemporary discussions of the distinction between image and material photographic object. This is a present-day analytical interpretation of the project, not a term used by the catalogue itself.

[12] The extension of the argument from analogue circulation in 2009 to digital image generation and AI in 2026 is a contemporary interpretation used to connect the historical project with the current research framework; it is not a claim made in the 2009 catalogue.