City of the Living / City of the Dead | Open-air Exhibition in New York

City of the Living / City of the Dead is a photography project by Robert Wilczyński. By combining archival images of people and places in the Warsaw Ghetto (from the Warsaw Ghetto Museum collection) with photographs of Warsaw today, the artist brings back and visualises a dramatic period in the city’s history.

Due to the annihilation of almost all of Warsaw’s Jewish community during World War II and the destruction of its material and cultural heritage, the images of the ghetto and those confined there appear in the photographs as ephemeral traces. They permeate the fabric of the contemporary city like memories rooted in a bygone age, demanding that their story be remembered.

The photographs are accompanied by selected quotations from primary sources, including journals and diaries documenting daily life, suffering and death in the ghetto in 1940-1942.

The exhibition is part of the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

• Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in New York
  233 Madison Avenue (Jan Karski Corner), New York, NY 10016