Book dossier

Polish Cold War neon

by Ilona Karwińska

Karwińska gathers together photographs taken over more than five years all over Poland, documenting what remains of a once extravagant plan to neonize the entire country during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. The neon signs installed in Polish cities in the 1960s and 1970s were part of the international attempts to reconcile socialism and consumerism. Conferences in Czechoslovakia in 1957 and in the Soviet Union in 1958 set out to define a new kind of progressive advertising that would raise the tastes of consumers and rationalise their needs.