Meeting with Chris Niedenthal

March 30, 2011 / 6.00 pm

Center for Urban History, Lviv

A meeting was held with photographer Chris Niedenthal. There was also a presentation of his newly released photo album In Your Face whose introduction was written by Martin Pollack. This album was prepared and published by edition.fotoTAPETA, with offices in Berlin and Warsaw.

Lviv was the second city (after Leipzig) in which the publisher presented the album.

Chris Niedenthal also presented a slide show "Photographs of Central Eastern Europe from the 1980-90s." During the presentation visitors also had an opportunity to view Niedenthal’s other photographs which were used as covers for Time and Newsweek throughout the 1970-1990s.

Album Abstract:

From the notebook of a photographer for Newsweek, Time and other publications.
Portraits from Prague, Peking, Berlin, and Warsaw.
History, Read on Their Faces.

In the last few years history has brought us horror masquerading as change, and much has been and is being written about it openly—in Prague, and in Peking, in Berlin, Bucharest and Warsaw. The Polish photographer Chris Niedenthal was a witness; he saw the human face and documented everything with his camera.

Chris Niedenthal

Born in 1950 to a Polish family in London. He has been living in Poland for over 20 years. He studied photography at the London College of Printing. He first came to Poland in 1973. Until 1984, he worked as a photojournalist for Newsweek in Poland. In 1985 he began working for Time photographing the events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. For many years he also worked for the German weekly “Der Spiegel”.

He won the World Press Photo in 1986 for his picture of Hungarian communist leader Janos Kadar. He has held many photo exhibits, and the following photo albums: PRL. Rekwizyty (2004) and “13/12. PolskaStanuWojennego” (2006).

Martin Pollack

born in 1944 in Upper Austria: a journalist, an essayist, and translator. He has lived in Vienna and Burgenland. For many years has worked as a journalist for Spiegel in both Vienna and Warsaw. His has written numerous books, mostly on Central and Eastern Europe, and has earned many awards.