The original collections of Tychy photographs held by the Tychy City Museum undoubtedly focus on these vertical images, while underrepresenting the horizontal axis, i.e. the street- or eye-level zone, nowhere near as orderly and flawless as the panorama view, but closer to that everyday experience which found its manifestation in the figure of the flâneur. The rare occurrence of street level images also translates into the infrequent presentation of individual human figures: many photographs either lack them at all or they are reduced to a group, a community or a social type. In this sense, the Tychy photographs seem stuck at an early stage of modernist urban photography. There are no traces of Weeggee’s naked city, no Brassaï tries to sneakily take his mysterious night snaps, no private New York topography is charted by Diane Arbus, and no-one takes candid shots like those by Walker Evans, who keenly peeped at subway commuters.

Although the close and privileged relations between photography and the city are indisputable, the nature of this relationship has never been clearly defined, especially if photographers' efforts are to be considered an art form, which – as we all know from the history of photography – would not be a compliment to all those indulging in photography. While some approach the city as a social work of art, it is much more common to treat it as an object of interest for artistic culture (literature, film, visual arts, photography), which produces its own imagery that often has the power to define social awareness and perception of urban space, often with a critical view of the prevailing political or economic visions of its functioning. There is yet another proposition, namely to assume that photography has a role in documenting the city, although not as a simple imitation or mirror reflection, but as a more complex, culturally underpinned representation. This refers to photographic philosophies emerging from the straight photography (or pure photography) tradition, focused on a new perception and ‘new objectivity’, and as such liberated from the aesthetic influences of visual arts. Pure photography – sharp, veristic and unprejudiced – opted for the appreciation of its own language of photography, a language which, according to its advocates, was capable of describing modernity (and within it a modern city). The emphasis on these qualities was at the heart of modernist photographic aesthetics which, having rejected pictorialism and other forms of imitative painterly approach, dominated until the 1970s and gave birth to a number of great modernist projects, such as the celebrated city ‘monographs’ of Paris (Eugène Atget), Berlin (Heinrich Zilly) or Vilnius (Jan Bułhak).

Photographic representations are intrinsically paradoxical, since – although far from mimetic realism (which was believed in the early days of photography, fuelled by assumption that mechanical reproduction is a guarantee of objectivity) – they seem to possess the power to authenticate and magically transfer us in time and space. The truth of photography is not the truth of the correspondence between reality and its image, but the truth of the constantly redefined meaning, the truth of the cognising individual that can be different every time.

Jon Wagner, an American visual sociologist, reflects on the realism of photography by invoking a British project in which six photographers were asked to take pictures of six cities, each of which was photographed by two artists. The exhibition of the work done, showed the inherently subjective nature of photography with all its sharpness: the very same city portrayed by different photographers appeared completely different in their respective photos, while different cities photographed by the same author looked very similar, especially in the eyes of people who had no first-hand experience the cities themselves. Of course, a closer look at the at the same images by people who were familiar with the cities in question, made it possible to identify their specific features, and thus break the individual perspective to reveal the intersubjective value of photography.

The photographs from the Tychy City Museum's collection are particularly striking in the context of the subjective-objective nature of photography, because despite the assumed different perceptions of photographers, resulting from the influence of historical time, or their different roles, objectives and experiences, we never seem to forget that we remain in the same city! The visual weight of the city, what draws our eye, regardless of whether we view Tychy in statu nascendi or as if it were already completed (though not quite so, which will be discussed in a moment), makes all the photographers succumb to its gravitational power, which cannot be disturbed by any artistic and professional extravagances and transgressions. Perhaps the only example of a different kind of perception are the photographs by Michał Cała, whose phantasmagoric-postapocalyptic vision of Tychy distinguishes him from the other authors, even though it is delicate scratching rather than breaking the structure, a kind of personal criticism of the neglected and devastated substance of Upper Silesia.

The Tychy photographs illustrate the transformation of the local urban landscape in time: the 1950s and early-1960s photos, which mainly depict a giant building site, are easily distinguishable from the 1970s and 1980s cycles, where construction work has already been completed and where people are busy living in the city, rather than building it. However, the completion of works does not necessarily mean the completion of the project, as evidenced by some infrastructural elements of the landscape, e.g. frail greenery, baldish garden squares, unpaved yards, provisional access roads and potholed streets, which remain basically unchanged, being the same sorry sight in Tychy (and other communist cities) both in the 1950s and in the 1980s.

Nearly all photographers seem to notice the urban-meets-rural character of the new housing estates and eagerly emphasise this impression of the blocks being located in open fields or even 'growing' directly from grain fields. The conceptual contrast between grazing cows and concrete residential blocks proves an irresistible temptation...

That ‘permanent impermanence’ is also clearly visible in relation to children's playgrounds, which seem an important marker of the level of social development. This brings to mind the words of art historian Lars Bang Larsen, who describes a neglected playground as one of the saddest sights, representing in a nutshell ‘a common inability to exercise civic freedoms, their total abandonment, or a missed opportunity to improve social sensitivity’., and all of that because ‘the very idea of creating a playground for children as a way of focusing dispersed folk energy teaches us contemporary attitudes: how to rise after one trips and falls and how to learn to use one's own mind without outside help". There are either no playgrounds in Tychy's housing estates at all, or these facilities are reduced to single devices that look like creepy props in a post-nuclear computer game. But beware: children represent untamed energy; they are pioneers who conquer new territories and adapt them to their needs. They can create playgrounds from nothing wherever they are. A heap of sand left by the builders in the winter season is a good-enough slide, construction equipment must be explored from all sides, carpet hangers and rubbish bins will serve as gymnastic equipment, while a large mud puddle is a perfect setting for the next adventure of the young conquerors of the Amazon!

A photograph is a casual paraphrase or perhaps an interpretation of reality, rather than a direct quote from it, because a photographer's camera registers images to the same degree as it creates them. It is a tool other than the standard methods of cognition and reporting used in science. The merits of photography do not derive from the fact that it is a faithful copy of the reality, but from the fact that it portrays it in a new light, in a different, more intense manner, drawing our attention to what is usually overlooked. Only in this sense can photography be considered a reliable source of knowledge or data.