At the beginning of the previous century, when the construction of the world’s largest steelworks began in the United States of America, the entire process of creating the plant on the shores of Lake Michigan and its neighbouring city was documented by hired photographers. The investment by United the United States Steel Corporation lead to the establishment not only of a modern industrial plant (which became a model for the Soviet Magnitogorsk and, indirectly, Nowa Huta), but also of systematically planned workers’ housing estates, providing a higher standard of living than before. Just as any other utopian project, the city of Gary, so named after Albert Henry Gary, one of the founders of the corporation, has never seen completion. The idea that steelworkers should take out loans and build their houses on local plots of land according to standard plans failed dismally for purely economic reasons. Only the technical supervisors could afford such investments, while most of the proletarians, many of whom were incomers from Eastern Europe intending to make money and return to their families rather than settle down, chose to flock in rented rooms. The entire process of creating this giant plant-and-city complex can be traced on 8x10-inch glass negatives which are currently owned by Indiana University (a collection of 2200 images is digitised and available on the university’s website).

The photographs from Gary, which are typical documentation shots from those years (with brief captions containing descriptions of what they represent written directly onto the images), may surprise us with their modern approach to the subject. The carefully composed images not only document the construction of blast furnaces, steelworks halls, chimneys and docks for iron ore barges, but are also an indication of a passion for industrialism. The now-anonymous photographers hired by the U.S. Steel Co. in the early 20th century used a veristic visual language, which had two wait another two decades to gain full artistic prominence thanks to the artists associated with the New Objectivity movement. Undoubtedly, this documentation is also a powerful propaganda aspect, and the collection of attractively presented industrial facilities demonstrated the strength of the trust and the money behind this investment. It is worth noting that the builders of the combine, or its employees captured in later photographs, when the smelter was already in full operation, are as anonymous as the photographers behind their cameras, and appear in the images merely as staffage.

The construction of a giant steelworks (named after Vladimir Ilyich Lenin) near the village of Mogiła, along with an adjoining city which was to eventually swallow up Krakow, was naturally played out in propaganda. Professional photographers were also employed here, but the scope of the documentary evidence was very limited. The reality of building industrial facilities and neighbouring residential estates, designed as a model urban layout of the ‘first socialist city’ , was poorly suited for agitational use due to the general mess and disorder. The 1958 colour photographs by Wiktor Pental, discovered years later, show that the socialistrealist developments of Górali, Szkolnego and Zgody housing estates still feature untendered brickwork façades, a sight that remained unchanged until the middle of the next decade. What is astonishing to see when browsing through the photographs by Wiktor Pental, but also by Henryk Hermanowicz and Henryk Makarewicz (both hired to do propaganda pictorials), and more contemporary photographers, is the overall lack of any attempt to mark Nowa Huta’s very planning concept, with its programmed urban order and symmetry drawing on the Renaissance ideal city layout.

The construction of Nowe Tychy, a modern city which, as part of the deglomeration programme, was located at a distance of 10-12 kilometres from the tedious smelters and mining exploitation areas of Upper Silesia, began in the early 1950s. Naturally, the buildings of the first housing estate marked with the letter “A” , designed by Professor Tadeusz Teodorowicz-Todorowski’s studio, were built in the style of socialist realism, although their design also bears a noticeable influence of the pre-war Red Vienna architecture. In 1951, after winning a closed competition, a team led by Kazimierz Wejchert and Hanna Adamczewska-Wejchert took over the development of Nowe Tychy’s planning concept, a project which they chaperoned until the late 1980s. The collection of photographs by Michał Cała, Andrzej Czyżewski, Stanisław Kasperowicz, Ireneusz Kaźmierczak, Zygmunt Kubski, Krzysztof Pilecki and Zygmunt Wieczorek, gathered by the Tychy City Museum, shows the subsequent stages of the city’s creation. The fact that the selected photographers include both professionals as well as a construction company worker, an architect, and number of artistically minded photographers who once co-created the Tychy KRON group means that the perspective presented here is varied and essentially different from the visual propaganda exercised during the communist era.

It seems that the photographers documenting the expansion of Nowe Tychy were not necessarily following this concept. Instead, they seem to have chosen more intimate, as if private, themes existing alongside the propaganda trend. Hence, there are many genre scenes, albeit devoid of any dramatic content, and a large number of images of housing estate construction and finished houses, although it is clear that the photographers demonstrated no particular enthusiasm for the idea of block architecture. And while we can also come across images from official visits by local party authorities (e.g. General Jerzy Ziętek - Chairman of the Presidium of the Voivodeship National Council in Katowice from 1964 to 973), the banal existence of a medium-sized industrial city seems to prevail. Local residents, dressed up in their ‘Sunday-best’ clothes, enjoy a stroll through the streets of Housing Estate A or come back from Mass in St. John the Baptist’s Church. We can also see them at work or on the way to work, and many shots feature drying laundry: whether hung on cords stretched between blocks of flats or on balconies of newly erected houses. Baby suits and nappies seem to abound as a perfect reflection of the post-war baby boom.

Perhaps, to some extent, the fiasco of the left-wing concept of social transformation, in which the newly emerging architecture was to be a clear sign of change and at the same time an incentive to take part in such a project, involved, among other things, an ill-developed visual representation. Bold urban concepts, with residential complexes based on the principles of the Athens Charter, have never seen proper completion, always lacking the final touches (or any finishing works at all), which is clearly visible in the photographs from the Tychy collection, especially those by Michał Cała. How could modernist blocks of flats modelled on studio projects of Berlin’s Hansaviertel estate have had a positive impact on a Tychy or Nowa Huta worker when they had been unplastered for months with abandoned bits of building materials lying about in would-be green squares? On the other hand, it was not until recently that enthusiasts of socmodernist architecture made sure that the buildings created in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s were presented in an attractive way, reflecting the intentions of the architects who designed them. No innovations were made, by the way, the blocks and estates were photographed in a precise, veristic manner that has been used in architectural photography for over a century. The entrepreneurial USS capitalists, recalled in the introduction to this essay, were clearly aware of the importance of the visual message, so they ensured (and not only for the sake of the shareholders and banks) that the construction of the steelworks at Lake Michigan was given a photographic portrayal that, a hundred years on, still offers an attractive viewing experience going well beyond its archival value. The socmodernist architecture of Nowe Tychy is in dire need a modern photographic representation. Who will be the first to take up this challenge?