Exhibiting Ethnic Minorities, Democratizing History: Cold War Legacies and the Jews in Poland’s Visible Sphere

We would like to thank Gołda Tencer-Szurmiej and Ewa Pałuba for granting us access to the Shalom Foundation photographic archive. All the photographs from And I still See Their Faces printed in this chapter are taken from that archive and reproduced courtesy of Gołda Tencer-Szurmiej, General Director of the Shalom Foundation in Poland. We published another study about And I still See Their Faces under the title “Beyond the Familial Impulse: Domestic Photography and Sociocultural History in Post-communist Poland, 1989-1996,” in “Seeing Family,” eds. Jennifer Orpana and Sarah Parsons, special issue, Photography & Culture 10, no. 2 (2017): 121-145. For a Polish translation of our article on And I still See Their Faces see, “Subwersywna moc prywatnych kolekcji fotografii. Żydzi w polskiej pamięci zbiorowej po upadku komunizmu”, in Konteksty: Antropologia Kultury-Etnografia-Sztuka LXXI/3 (2017): 212-224. ; This book chapter explores how Soviet Cold War visual doctrines and their legacies have conditioned the appearance of Jews in Poland’s visible sphere of the Polish People’s Republic and during the emergence of the post-communist Third Polish Republic. It focuses on the effects of a 1994 crowed-sourced photography contest that culminated in an exhibition, a book, and a collection of over 7000 photographic records concerning Polish-Jewish visual and living heritage. While doing so, the chapter unravels the means which the Polish state employed during the communist era to control the representational visibility of ethnic minorities and secure an impression of Poland as a socially and politically homogenized country. Analyzing the sociocultural outcomes caused by the reintroduction of images of Jews into Poland’s post-communist visible sphere, the chapter highlights the role they have played in assisting Polish society to overcome Soviet Cold War definitions of Polish culture, collective memory, history and identity.