Selected text
To be a [recognized] craftsman you had to buy a license, I seem to remember. I suspect it was in around 1908, maybe 1909 or 1910 that the Moderne photographic firm was opened, and it soon began to grow.
The studio was on the main street, Kolejowa. We lived in the same building. The entrance to the studio was opposite our apartment, which was through the courtyard, on the mezzanine floor. The photographic studio was built in the courtyard, a very light construction.
Frosted windows, a glass roof, and frosted window panes shaded from the inside with short, dark blue curtains that you pulled across with a pole to get the right amount of light for a photograph. On one side the whole wall was glass. When it hailed heavily, hailstones the size of chicken’s eggs, it shattered good and proper.
There was a photograph of a hailstone like that, the size of a chicken’s egg. I was about eight then, I think, I ran out into the street. I had this very nice shirt on, maybe it was a holiday, maybe a Saturday – in any case I had this good shirt on, and I went picking up these hailstones and put them in my shirtfront, and ran proudly home, which brought a cry of despair from my mother:
‘How dirty you are! What have you done? And I worked so hard!’ I’d collected all those hailstones and here I was getting ticked off!
The studio had a two-story stone annex. You went up wooden steps, quite steep, to the upper floor, and that was the laboratory. There was a machine for making enlargements, that was where the photographs were developed, enlarged, trimmed, etc. There was usually another person working there – one, two or three people worked there. As far as I remember the principal employee was my cousin, my mother’s sister’s son Moric Chitler.
There was a cashier too – in front of the entrance to the studio there was a little room where the cash desk was and orders were taken. Customers would come, place their orders, and then go through into the studio and there the photographs were taken.
It was usually Father who took the photographs, until his last years, until the 1930s, and then later Artur and my younger brothers took the photographs. And of course there were props in the studio – columns and whatever. Background to suit the customer. One of those props was a rocking horse; there’s a photograph of me, as a two-year-old kid with our little dog Milka, holding that horse.
The clientele were small-town folk, just small farmers; sometimes wealthier people, a doctor or a lawyer, would have their photograph taken there. Once, the later US chess Grand Master happened on us. How was that possible? Well, he was this little lad of maybe ten, by the name of Szmulek Rzeszewski or Rzeszowski, dressed in the regular Jewish fashion, a long coat, Jewish cap, a kind of flat, peaked cap.
He’d come from some tiny village where he’d been discovered as a wunderkind who played incredible chess. And he was traveling via Kielce, via Hamburg, to America, where some relatives evidently had had him come over. Afterwards, many years later, I found out that it was ‘the’ Rzeszewski, who was the US Grand Master for a good few years.
And he had his photograph taken there [in Moderne]. My father, who was a great chess lover, used to say with reverence that he had taken that Rzeszewski’s photograph. And I was standing by him, and saw the photograph being taken.
The fittings in the studio changed [over time]. Initially the lighting was natural, in the form of the curtains that Father or his assistant would adjust using a long pole. Later on electric lamps were installed, known as ‘Jupiters,’ spotlights, but that wasn’t until the 1930s, when electric lighting became more accessible, although very expensive. A kilowatt-hour cost around 50 groszy, or two and a half loaves of bread. How much did we spend in Kielce? Hard to say, but I suspect around 200 or 300 zloty a month on overheads, certainly.
Glass negatives? Quite simply, there was no film. Instead of paper, glass was used as the base for applying the emulsion. And that was gelatin with a silver chloride or bromide solution (the compounds are more complex today). There were no x-rays on film at that time either.
The Kodak technology, whereby a photograph can be taken directly onto paper, did not exist. At that time the photograph was taken on a negative, on which there was a glass plate coated in emulsion, and the paper print, or the positive, was made from that plate.
That was the coating technique that my father later realized [propagated] in Kielce when he built a small factory making photographic plates and paper sometime in the 1930s. The factory was called Orion. It manufactured not only for his own use but primarily for sale.
And the glass plate is a separate story which also involves my mother. There were times of great poverty in Poland and he had to save on staff, and there were times when he had staff. And so my mother [often] helped my father out. Aside from having to feed the children, bring whatever she could buy from the bazaar, etc. Some years there was a maid, so most likely she went to the bazaar.
So Mother helped Father, sitting at the photography desk at night in the room where I and my three brothers slept – you see the four of us slept in two beds. There were two stands set up on the table, sloping, with opaque glass in them.
You put the plate on the opaque glass, and Mother examined the plate. She had a brush in her hand and she would dip the brush in this fluid, we could call it very pale ink, and she pointed up, covered in, the light patches on the plate. That was retouch. And that was done by Mother. Incredible, but with all those children to look after she still found time for that!
Maurycy was responsible for retouching the big enlargements, and he retouched the big enlargements in the studio. That kind of retouching didn’t involve patching [what his mother did] – he would even draw bits in, because he had artistic talents, so he would create this kind of sketched semi-portrait. And we sold them too, as something along the lines of artistic photography.
You couldn’t sell photographs with [blank] patches, because nevertheless there was competition; across the road was the Rembrandt photographic studio, Jewish-owned too. Hard to say [anything about it]. I know Rembrandt never visited us and we never visited them; I think he was enemy number one.
I don’t know what the owner of that studio was called. We knew him as Rembrandt. Just like they used to call Father Moderny, they’d never say ‘Gringras,’ ‘Mr. Gringras,’ only ‘Mr. Moderny.’
In the 1930s a branch of the Moderne photographic firm began to produce photographs of dead people fired onto porcelain. They were oval, fairly small porcelain photographs to go on gravestones. We among the Jews didn’t have this practice, it was just for Christians. In Kielce about two thirds, I suspect, were Catholics [2]. A regular trade.
Father was technically gifted; for instance, he converted a camera that stood on a tripod, quite a big camera, which you put a plate in to take a photograph using natural lighting. Well, in later years, Father altered that camera to save on plates.
At that time plates were imported from abroad: either German Agfas, or there were the Belgian Gevaerts. He made an insert that held a plate and allowed him to divide the plate up into four sections so that one frame could be exposed without the other three being exposed.
The studio was on the main street, Kolejowa. We lived in the same building. The entrance to the studio was opposite our apartment, which was through the courtyard, on the mezzanine floor. The photographic studio was built in the courtyard, a very light construction.
Frosted windows, a glass roof, and frosted window panes shaded from the inside with short, dark blue curtains that you pulled across with a pole to get the right amount of light for a photograph. On one side the whole wall was glass. When it hailed heavily, hailstones the size of chicken’s eggs, it shattered good and proper.
There was a photograph of a hailstone like that, the size of a chicken’s egg. I was about eight then, I think, I ran out into the street. I had this very nice shirt on, maybe it was a holiday, maybe a Saturday – in any case I had this good shirt on, and I went picking up these hailstones and put them in my shirtfront, and ran proudly home, which brought a cry of despair from my mother:
‘How dirty you are! What have you done? And I worked so hard!’ I’d collected all those hailstones and here I was getting ticked off!
The studio had a two-story stone annex. You went up wooden steps, quite steep, to the upper floor, and that was the laboratory. There was a machine for making enlargements, that was where the photographs were developed, enlarged, trimmed, etc. There was usually another person working there – one, two or three people worked there. As far as I remember the principal employee was my cousin, my mother’s sister’s son Moric Chitler.
There was a cashier too – in front of the entrance to the studio there was a little room where the cash desk was and orders were taken. Customers would come, place their orders, and then go through into the studio and there the photographs were taken.
It was usually Father who took the photographs, until his last years, until the 1930s, and then later Artur and my younger brothers took the photographs. And of course there were props in the studio – columns and whatever. Background to suit the customer. One of those props was a rocking horse; there’s a photograph of me, as a two-year-old kid with our little dog Milka, holding that horse.
The clientele were small-town folk, just small farmers; sometimes wealthier people, a doctor or a lawyer, would have their photograph taken there. Once, the later US chess Grand Master happened on us. How was that possible? Well, he was this little lad of maybe ten, by the name of Szmulek Rzeszewski or Rzeszowski, dressed in the regular Jewish fashion, a long coat, Jewish cap, a kind of flat, peaked cap.
He’d come from some tiny village where he’d been discovered as a wunderkind who played incredible chess. And he was traveling via Kielce, via Hamburg, to America, where some relatives evidently had had him come over. Afterwards, many years later, I found out that it was ‘the’ Rzeszewski, who was the US Grand Master for a good few years.
And he had his photograph taken there [in Moderne]. My father, who was a great chess lover, used to say with reverence that he had taken that Rzeszewski’s photograph. And I was standing by him, and saw the photograph being taken.
The fittings in the studio changed [over time]. Initially the lighting was natural, in the form of the curtains that Father or his assistant would adjust using a long pole. Later on electric lamps were installed, known as ‘Jupiters,’ spotlights, but that wasn’t until the 1930s, when electric lighting became more accessible, although very expensive. A kilowatt-hour cost around 50 groszy, or two and a half loaves of bread. How much did we spend in Kielce? Hard to say, but I suspect around 200 or 300 zloty a month on overheads, certainly.
Glass negatives? Quite simply, there was no film. Instead of paper, glass was used as the base for applying the emulsion. And that was gelatin with a silver chloride or bromide solution (the compounds are more complex today). There were no x-rays on film at that time either.
The Kodak technology, whereby a photograph can be taken directly onto paper, did not exist. At that time the photograph was taken on a negative, on which there was a glass plate coated in emulsion, and the paper print, or the positive, was made from that plate.
That was the coating technique that my father later realized [propagated] in Kielce when he built a small factory making photographic plates and paper sometime in the 1930s. The factory was called Orion. It manufactured not only for his own use but primarily for sale.
And the glass plate is a separate story which also involves my mother. There were times of great poverty in Poland and he had to save on staff, and there were times when he had staff. And so my mother [often] helped my father out. Aside from having to feed the children, bring whatever she could buy from the bazaar, etc. Some years there was a maid, so most likely she went to the bazaar.
So Mother helped Father, sitting at the photography desk at night in the room where I and my three brothers slept – you see the four of us slept in two beds. There were two stands set up on the table, sloping, with opaque glass in them.
You put the plate on the opaque glass, and Mother examined the plate. She had a brush in her hand and she would dip the brush in this fluid, we could call it very pale ink, and she pointed up, covered in, the light patches on the plate. That was retouch. And that was done by Mother. Incredible, but with all those children to look after she still found time for that!
Maurycy was responsible for retouching the big enlargements, and he retouched the big enlargements in the studio. That kind of retouching didn’t involve patching [what his mother did] – he would even draw bits in, because he had artistic talents, so he would create this kind of sketched semi-portrait. And we sold them too, as something along the lines of artistic photography.
You couldn’t sell photographs with [blank] patches, because nevertheless there was competition; across the road was the Rembrandt photographic studio, Jewish-owned too. Hard to say [anything about it]. I know Rembrandt never visited us and we never visited them; I think he was enemy number one.
I don’t know what the owner of that studio was called. We knew him as Rembrandt. Just like they used to call Father Moderny, they’d never say ‘Gringras,’ ‘Mr. Gringras,’ only ‘Mr. Moderny.’
In the 1930s a branch of the Moderne photographic firm began to produce photographs of dead people fired onto porcelain. They were oval, fairly small porcelain photographs to go on gravestones. We among the Jews didn’t have this practice, it was just for Christians. In Kielce about two thirds, I suspect, were Catholics [2]. A regular trade.
Father was technically gifted; for instance, he converted a camera that stood on a tripod, quite a big camera, which you put a plate in to take a photograph using natural lighting. Well, in later years, Father altered that camera to save on plates.
At that time plates were imported from abroad: either German Agfas, or there were the Belgian Gevaerts. He made an insert that held a plate and allowed him to divide the plate up into four sections so that one frame could be exposed without the other three being exposed.
Period
Interview
Julian Gringras