“I was going to start this text about Chris Niedenthal’s album with a thump, and then, step by step, figure by figure I intended to comment archly on the absurdities of those times, however, I hardly made a start, when I suddenly found myself utterly overwhelmed and engulfed by the magic of his photographs”, says Polish writer Jerzy Pilch in the foreword to the book. Indeed, it is impossible not to succumb to the artist’s unique photographic vision. Chris Niedenthal happened to catch Poland in her late-communist period and documented the life as it was there and then with flair and true artistic mastery. Anti-government demonstrations, tanks in the streets, ZOMO motorized militia units, communist party apparatchiks, mile-long queues outside shops, the drabness of everyday life – all this he was able to catch and convey in his works. “The paradox of Niedenthal and the greatness of his talent consist in the fact that he had set out to create a curio collection of the absurdities of the failing communist regime, but ended up creating a rich tapestry, both comical and dramatic in its realism, of life itself. He was aiming at giving us some People’s Poland panopticon, but instead gave us a masterpiece, indefinitely more powerful than any, and especially political, contexts”, writes Pilch. Among the 312 pages of the album you will also find photographs taken in other communist countries of the day, including Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Yugoslavia, the USSR, Hungary and Romania. Available in a bilingual Polish-English version.