Wednesday 19 June 2019, 7.30 pm
JW3
341-351 Finchley Road
London, NW3 6ET
There are subjects that are always worth talking about and a truly valuable discussion by particularly knowledgeable people is something that we cannot allow ourselves to miss.
Imprisoned by Memory at JW3 is exactly this kind of discussion.
Journalist and photographer, Bogdan Frymorgen will talk about his powerful and stunning photographic essay Kazimierz with the world class specialist in Holocaust studies and history of Jews in Poland – Antony Polonsky.
Kazimierz is a very personal meditation on the relationship between an artist and a unique place on earth. The old Jewish Quarter has experienced a rapid gentrification in the past few years, becoming a fashionable night out destination for Krakow’s visitors and residents.
All the bars, clubs and restaurants slowly began to overshadow memory of the past. But sometimes a haunting silence and emptiness can expose truth about the place.
Frymorgen and Polonsky will take you on a personal, touching and nostalgic but also painful journey; a snapshot of history, showing in Frymorgen words: the world that soon will not exist, which died once already. This journey is necessary to remember and reflect on the horrific past, before allowing yourself to remain in the careless future.
In uncompromising, but truthful words of Irit Amiel about the book:
I’m browsing through the pages of the book by my friend, Bogdan Frymorgen, and I feel a total lack of Jewish life in these photographs.
For me, Poland, in its entirety, remains one big graveyard.
A painful, bleeding wound. Polish-Jewish history came to an end and this book breathes the emptiness.