Gallery Next to ZPAF, Castle Square 8, Warsaw / Opening ceremony July 20, 2023 / 7 pm / The exhibition will last until August 20, 2023
Exhibition of photographs from 1945-1959
Leonard Jabrzemski (1887 - 1970) is a somewhat forgotten photographer of Warsaw. When looking at his work, the most striking images are those realized just after the end of World War II
and ten years later.
Documentation from the 1940s of the Old City and its immediate environs, turned into one big rubble heap, reveals the scale of the capital's wartime destruction. Not a single Old Town house survived. Jabrzemski roamed, with his camera to his eye, through the streets and alleys of the Old City, recording the ruins and ruins. In the 1950s Jabrzemski returned with his camera to the same places he had been immediately after the war. He took another series of photographs.
Several dozen single frames were donated by the author to the ZPAF photo library. These are his original prints. These are completely different images from those created today. The nobility of the old photographic paper, its refined tonality, the gentle transition from white, through gray to black, the matte surface of most of the photographs, takes the viewer back to that old time of the mid-20th century. Having the author's prints in front of you, you feel the magic of this old photography and this old time recorded in the photos.
The current exhibition is a reminder of an important author for Warsaw, who documented the city's re-birth in a very consistent way, from the dark, blackened images of the post-war period to the joyful, light-shining frames after its reconstruction.
Andrew Zygmuntowicz
About the author of the photos
Leonard Jabrzemski (1887-1970) - photographer of Warsaw, member of ZPAF and ZAIKS, long-time contributor to the weekly "Stolica", and above all author of photographś taken for the Warsaw Reconstruction Bureau. He published his work in the press, books, albums, postcards and exhibited in galleries.
The event is organized by the Union of Polish Artists Photographers Warsaw District.
Leonard Jabrzemski's photography exhibition "Return to Life" will be held as part of the 70th Birthday of Warsaw's Old Town.