Chris Schwarz was a British photographer and the founder and first director of the Galicia Jewish Museum. Beginning in the early 1990s, he came 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, however, took place a decade earlier. 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 the countryside on the way between these two cities.

We opened an exhibition based on these photographs in June 2024 as part of the celebrations of the Museum’s 20th anniversary. Now, thanks to generous funding from the “KPO dla Kultury” Program, we are excited to present a new, expanded version of the exhibition as well as an accompanying catalogue, both of which feature previously unpublished photographs and texts.

The discussion accompanying the premiere will be attended by Róża Thun, an anti-communist opposition activist in the 1970s and 1980s and later a three-term European Parliament MP, and Jacek Stawiski, a journalist and Director of the Galicia Jewish Museum.

The meeting will be led by Tomasz Strug, curator of the “May ’81” exhibition.

Free admission.
The event will be streamed online.

Funded by the European Union NextGenerationEU.