Mexican-born Barbey, who died in 2020 at the age of 79, spent four decades travelling across five continents capturing the everyday life of local communities and landmark moments in the history of Europe and the world.
The exhibition features his photo reports from countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, Egypt, Vietnam, India, Japan, France, Ukraine and Spain.
A separate section of the exhibition focuses on Barbey’s visits to Poland in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as in 1981, the year of the Solidarity revolution.
Caroline Thiénot-Barbey, the artist’s wife and the exhibition’s co-curator, has said that her husband’s first encounters with Poland were in 1967, during a visit by French President Charles de Gaulle, and in 1979, to cover Pope John Paul II’s first visit to his homeland.
“It was then that the pope said: ‘There cannot be a just Europe without an independent Poland on its map.’ We were fascinated by what was going on in your country,” Thiénot-Barbey told Poland's PAP news agency.
In her interview with PAP, she recalled their time in Poland in 1981.
“We spent eight months travelling in a caravan," she said. "This was a good way to avoid surveillance by Polish security police which had its eye on the foreigners staying in hotels. Barbey was in the Gdańsk shipyard and other places, keenly documenting the people and events of the Solidarity movement. He was also fascinated by the young, open-minded people taking part in religious pilgrimages."
After his 1981 visit to Poland, Barbey published a photo book entitled Pologne.
Barbey had a long-standing relationship with Magnum Photos, serving as its vice president for Europe in 1978-1979, and from 1992 to 1995 as president of Magnum International.
The Warsaw exhibition, Barbey's first retrospective show in Poland, runs at the National Museum until March 3.
(mk/gs)