The exhibition brings together a selection of photos by acclaimed photographer, journalist and documentary filmmaker Czesław Czapliński, who has lived in New York and Warsaw for over four decades now.
The photographs are taken from Poland’s National Digital Archives, to which the artist started transferring his entire legacy two years ago.
The director of the National Digital Archives, Paweł Zawilski, writes in the exhibition catalogue: “Czesław Czapliński's photographs take us on a nostalgic journey to a New York which no longer exists, because ... it has ceased to be an unattainable dream.
"At any time, we can board a plane and land at Kennedy Airport. The spell has been broken, it flew away somewhere … The National Digital Archives is happy to invite you to admire a city where everything was possible, and as Liza [Minnelli] sang: If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere. The proof of which is the career of the photographer.”
The photos show New York’s monumental architecture and "the everyday life of the city in motion," including winter scenes in Central Park, "shots of firefighters in action, cabbies from Manhattan resting, and ordinary passers-by on their way to work."
During the exhibition's launch on Monday, Czapliński received the Gloria Artis Gold Medal of Cultural Merit from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.
The New York, New York exhibition runs until the end of May.
Czapliński, who turns 70 in July, has more than 40 photobooks and more than 300 exhibitions to his credit. His pictures were published in The New York Times, Time magazine, Newsweek, Vanity Fair and The Washington Post, and have been included in the collections of the Library of Congress in Washington, the New York Public Library, the National Museum in Warsaw and in many private collections around the world.
Czapliński has photographed some of the top personalities from the worlds of business, culture, politics, and sports, such as Leonard Bernstein, Bernardo Bertolucci, Cindy Crawford, Catherine Deneuve, Placido Domingo, Umberto Eco, Michael Jackson, Henry Kissinger, Calvin Klein, Luciano Pavarotti, Roman Polanski, Isabella Rossellini and Andy Warhol.
(mk/gs)
Source: czczaplinski.com