Warszawa 1945 

by Emilia Borecka & Leonard Sempolinski

Polish text edition, 1985

Good vintage condition: slight age-related yellowing to the pages but no marks, creases or folds; slight damage to the front flyleaf. Board covers and binding is good; slight damage to the bottom of the spine. Dust jacket is present and has moderate wear, mostly to the edges including some loss of laminate. Stock images used in this listing

A harrowing visual documentation of the ruins of Warsaw, made shortly after the liberation of the city by the Polish People’s Army and the Red Army. The text in this edition is in Polish.

The entirety of the collection of photographs of Warsaw ruins was taken in 1945–1946 by Leonard Sempoliński (1902–1988), who debuted as a photographer just before the war. The collection numbered several hundred photographs. The author was the first photographer who was not embedded with the army to document the ruins of the capital city, starting in January 1945. He would often set off across the Vistula River, but he did not do so on a regular basis. Sempoliński’s collection is distinguished among the vast number of photographs depicting the ruins of Warsaw not only by their early date of creation and scale, but also by the high technical level for that time and a variety of capturing methods. It included a variety of motifs and themes, ‘from panoramas to detail close-ups; . . . from objects as symbolic as the remains of St John’s Cathedral, to the elements of metal fences’. One should not also forget about the documentation of human remains in the burnt-out ruins of townhouses and in field hospitals.

In 1975, the album Warszawa 1945 [Warsaw 1945] was released on the initiative of Emilia Borecka, thanks to which Sempoliński’s became even more popular than before, and which also gave it a specific interpretation. The photographs were accompanied by quotations from the press, literature and official documents (lists of exhumed bodies), describing the ambiguous condition of the survivor of the turmoil of war — an experienced participant of the events, who was also a romantic observer. The overall mood of the album is reflected, among others, in the words of Paweł Herz: ‘Why do you cry, traveller of dreams, tourist of ruins, who once journeyed through the dead cemeteries of ancient civilisations? What do you think about when you see the white of human bones peeking from under a destroyed wall? . . .’ For decades, the corpus of photographs by Sempoliński was the most famous visual collection of the post-war ruins of Warsaw.

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