Photographs perpetuate history and allow to preserve it for the future generations. That is the case with the photographs by Wiktor Jekimienko from the 1920s and 1040s, which document the creation of the first heat and power plant in Łódź, EC1, and the toil of the power engineers from that city. The photographer, with admirable persistence and inquisitiveness, recorded the most significant moments in the history of the plant on film and transferred them onto glass negatives, thus creating the priceless collection of c.a. 2500 negatives.

Owing to the dedication of photography and history lovers, and to the initiative of the employees of Veolia Energia Łódź, the photographs were first presented to a larger audience during the 10th International Festival of Photography, in May 2011. The first part of the project involved selecting and scanning 260 negatives. The photographs present the construction of the most important EC1 facilities and the portraits of the staff, as it is the best preserved, and the most abundant, material of the highest artistic quality. It not only gives a representative overview of the archive, but also paints a picture of the industrial Łódź of its time. Photographic documentation of the extension and the operation of EC1 in Łódź, group portraits of its employees and Łódź landscapes from the early 20th century are unique traces of the history of our city.

Today, we reveal another fragment of that precious collection. We have selected only a couple of pictures from 250 negatives, as a teaser for a larger whole, which will soon be made available to the audience.

The Energy of time project was created as a result of cooperation between the company Veolia Energia Łódź and the International Festival of Photography in Łódź, owing to the dedication of Andrzej Boroń, head of EC1 in the 1980s, Marek Domański, Marta Szymańska and Dagmara Bugaj from the Strzemiński Academy of Art in Łódź and the employees of Veolia Energia Łódź.