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Ilona Karwinska
Polish Cold War Neon
Mark Batty Books

In 2005 British photographer Ilona Karwińska visited Warsaw and was struck by the presence of huge signs advertising and promoting long-gone brands and products, a memorial to the Communist era of a country keen to move forward and put its past behind it. Karwińska, a graduate of Goldsmiths College and the London College of Printing who specialises in world cultures, decided to document these glorious testaments to the county’s extraordinary typographic past before they disappeared, and has collected hundreds of her photographs of the signs in this beautiful book in a bid to preserve and celebrate the achievements of their makers.
Polish neon signage emerged in 1929 and quickly became renowned for its technical and artistic qualities,  shaping other design forms in the country immediately thanks to its variety of forms and originality; an originality that came from being designed and made by architects, graphic designers and artists, all overseen by a graphic designer in the state-run Reklama, which at one time maintained more than 1,000 of them. Originally created to encourage consumerism in an economically stagnant Poland during the Cold War, the signs, incorporating big, bold decorative fonts and figurative elements, stood as beacons of bright light and hope in a drab landscape, and collected together in Karwinska’s book they show a startling and delightful variety of expression and style which can’t help but make you smile in wonder. Karwinska’s photos, juxtaposed and interspersed with archival images, do the signs real justice, viewed as they are from unexpected angles and crops that create their own enticing landscapes – aided by the book’s landscape format which creates lush cinemascope-style spreads. The result is a book that is playful and wonderful, and a loving document of not just a bygone era but an often overlooked form of  design that deserves to be recognised for the influence it has on all of us.