Poland

During a decade of regular visits to Poland from 1977 to 1986, the American photographer, Jill Hartley, developed a sympathetic attachment to the Poles at a key moment in their country's history. Rather than giving us a journalistic account, she seeks to distill the essence of a particular atmosphere and to render a little of this "Polishness," which was at the source of the revolutionary events of those years. Her pictures discreetly unveil a "found theater" where the protagonists are caught playing their own roles. Delicately, they show the extreme tension of a people always ready to rise up in defense of their dignity. In "Poland," her first book, she offers the vision of a remarkable photographer.