Central Photographic Agency 1951-1991
2021
The book is dedicated to the Central Agency of Photography (CAF), the state-run photographic agency that for four decades held a monopoly on documenting life in Poland. Its vast archive offers a unique visual record of a country undergoing profound political and social change. The design draws directly from CAF’s visual language and the era in which it operated, reinterpreting its archival references through a contemporary editorial approach and making the archive itself the foundation of the book’s visual identity.
Institute of National Remembrance
2021
Filip Tofil
Urszula Tofil
Marcin Dąbrowski
The design process began with the surviving visual traces of CAF’s original branding, with red as its most distinctive and consistent element. We developed a historical-inspired visual language around this colour, extending it across the publication as a strong graphic accent. For the typography, we chose Sharp, using its highly condensed styles to evoke the block-like lettering characteristic of printed publications from the 1960s and 1970s. The visual system was deliberately restrained, allowing the photographs and archival material to remain at the centre of the book.
The greatest challenge was working with the archive itself. At the author’s request, our role extended beyond the design of the publication into the process of constructing its visual narrative: selecting frames, cleaning and preparing archival images, and editing and sequencing photographs into meaningful relationships. The final selection emerged from a body of several tens of thousands of negatives, requiring extensive research, careful judgement and an editorial approach to image-making. The design therefore became closely intertwined with the act of looking through and interpreting the archive.
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