May ‘81. An exhibition of photographs by Chris Schwarz (PL/EN)

26.06.2024 - 18:00 / Galicia Jewish Museum, ul. Dajwór 18

Chris Schwarz was a British photographer and the founder and first director of the Galicia Jewish Museum. In the early 1990s, he began coming to Poland to photograph traces of Jewish heritage, signs of interest in Jewish culture and the rebirth of Jewish life in the country several decades after the Holocaust. The photographs he took during these visits later became the core of the Museum’s permanent exhibition.

Chris’s first visit to Poland took place a decade earlier, however. In May 1981, he came here as a freelance photojournalist wanting to document the realities of the communist country where the Solidarity movement had emerged less than a year earlier. During his short stay he worked mainly in Warsaw and Lublin, as well as in smaller towns and in the countryside on the way between these two cities. He photographed endless lines in front of stores, police in the streets, people praying, farmers resting after work. Through his lens he documented empty store shelves and better stocked (and less legal) market squares, where even behind the Iron Curtain one could buy jeans sent from the West by relatives or used LPs by Bob Dylan.

This exhibition is a photographic record of a journey that took place at a very particular time. 7 months after Chris’s return to London, martial law was introduced in Poland. Tanks stood on the same streets where he had walked with his camera just a few months earlier. The new developments in Poland and delays by his English publisher resulted in this material never being published.