Every saved picture is a record of the past marking a moment in history. But it is also beginning of a new story. By recreating, reconstructing and describing audiovisual documents, we look at them from the perspective of our knowledge and experience, and we can ascribe a present-day meaning to these materials.

The IPN Archive holds over 39 million photographs and over 2.5 thousand unique video recordings. The conference organizers, referring to popular video clips on the Internet showing the unboxing of various products, propose similar unboxing of the pictures stored in the archive. These collections should be presented in an interesting and imaginative way in public space.

The IPN President Karol Nawrocki referred to his previous professional experience in the field the role such materials play in museums:

When I visited the Mannerheim Museum in Helsinki there were two images of Baron Carl Gustaf Mannerheim. One represents him soon after he was born while the other shows him in a coffin. A ticking clock could clearly be heard in the background. This combination of sound and image is still engraved in my memory.

In another museum, dedicated to World War II in Canberra, one story was framed there in the photo of Leonard Siffleet, who volunteered for the Australian army in 1943 and fulfilled a special mission in Papua New Guinea. There he was betrayed, taken prisoner and lost his life. The photographer captured the exact moment where the Japanese soldier beheaded him. This photo brings more emotions than any technological solutions, museums or dozens of books.

More information in Polish including video from the conference is here.