Stefan Kiełsznia: Ulica Nowa 3

In the mid‑1930s, the Polish photographer Stefan Kiełsznia recorded five streets in the Jewish quarter of Lublin. He recorded the streets house by house, each time photographing the lower storeys with their small bars, stores and workshops. Kiełsznia’s detailed images show the window displays and the hand‑painted billboards above the shop entrances; they show the faces of the people hurrying past, their clothes, their postures, their movements. It is the animate everyday itself that is present here in all its particularities and that constitutes the special atmosphere of each image. This is why Kiełsznia’s photo series is such a unique source of the Polish‑Jewish life in Lublin only few years before the Holocaust. The publication Ulica Nowa 3 originated as an initiative of the artist Ulrike Grossarth and constitutes a catalogue of the entire known inventory of the photographs. For the first time, all 145 existing images from Stefan Kiełsznia’s street series are made available in printed form. Essays on the photo‑historical classification of these pictures as well as on the Jewish history of Lublin over the centuries allow the viewer to learn more about the context of the photographs’ origin and the record of the everyday which they offer.