Quite a unique action was „Empty – Full”, delivered with Bogdan Konopka. The exhibition inspired by the Buddhist aesthetics was prepared in summer 1982 during meetings of tens of young, independent people related to different religions and sub-culture movements that were held in Prałkowce near Przemyśl and in Gierałtowo. It gave a pretext for meetings, sometimes lasting for several days, of representatives of alternative theatre, yoga believers and haiku poets. One of the most intensive gatherings was an action that lasted uninterruptedly for three days at the Knight Academy in Legnica. The series of such actions held in several towns of Poland was triggered by the „Empty – Full” in “Foto-Medium-Art” (9.1982).
The situation that arose at that time gave start to a new movement which in the domain of photography was called “elementary”. First exhibitions in that cycle that lasted for several years were delivered by: Andrzej J. Lech (3.1983), Bogdan Konopka, Jakub Byrczek, Adam Lesisz, Wojciech Zawadzki, Jerzy Olek, Štepan Grygar, Miroslav Machotka Andreas Müller-Pohle, Gottfried Jäger, Eva Rubinstein, Jaroslav Beneš, Jan Svoboda. In September 1983, a plein-air workshop was held in “Samotnia” the result of which was the “Karkonosze” exhibition. In the catalogue to that show, I wrote “Co-authors of “Karkonosze”, though each in his/her own way, try to surpass the veristic picture. Surpassing aimed at abstraction. It seems simple to the extent that each hyper photograph is unrealistic in some way. This is so because it attracts attention primarily to its own form. That’s what elementary photography is all about. Logic and rational, pure and perfect, captivating with its simplicity and poetic in its harmony. It requires artistic consistency and discipline, exploratory passion and invention – indispensable, if we want to show the “invisible” when taking photographs of the common. Such photography, creating a new reality, its own reality, makes the very picture the criterion of truth.”
Another example of the elementary approach was provided by installations from the “Presence Amongst Stones” cycle. It had quite a number of authors, to include: Eugeniusz Józefowski, Mikołaj Smoczyński, Maciej Szańkowski, Jan Berdyszak, Tadeusz Sawa-Borysławski, Piotr Kowalski, Alojzy Gryt.
The largest events organized by “Foto-Medium-Art” comprised East-West Photoconferences called “European Exchange” – held every two years. The first one took place in 1989 and was Hyde-Park in nature. The second was composed of two parts: the “New Spaces of Photography” exhibition, in which 131 artists from 24 countries took part (e.g. Christo, Christian Boltanski, Georges Rousse, Felice Varini, Gottfried Jäger, Kurt Buchwald, Klaus Elle, Satoshi Saito, Boyd Webb, John Hilliard) and a seminar “Ethos of Photografy” (lectures given by such experts as: Urszula Czartoryska, Antonin Dufek, Vilem Flusser, Stefan Morawski, Marc Haworth-Booth, Rolf Sachsse). The third conference “Non-presence in Nature” was held in 1993 in the form of a sculpture & photography workshop. The next one was called “Point of Junction” and last but not least, the Polish & Japanese “Tomorrow is Today” showed in both countries.
