On display are over 200 pictures that represent a cross-section of Niedenthal’s five decades of work as a photographer, organizers said.
Niedenthal was born in 1950 in London to a family of Polish émigrés. He said during the opening ceremony that when he arrived in Poland in May 1973 he did not think he would stay in the country for longer.
“But this is what happened: Poland and everything that was going on here fascinated me," he said. "I married in Poland and my wife used to say that she married a young Englishman. Now I am an old Pole."
Piotr Jakubowski, the director of the History Meeting House, said that the thousands of photos taken by Niedenthal over the past 50 years document not only the history of Poland in its many aspects but also the history of the world.
“His activity is an integral part of our visual memory of past decades,” Jakubowski said of Niedenthal.
A man of many talents, Niedenthal played drums at a concert gracing the opening ceremony, as a member of the Sir Hardly Nobody band, which also featured Andrzej Werno (guitar/vocals) and Andrzej Narożański (bass/vocals).
In its recap of Niedenthal’s career, the History Meeting House writes on its website that “he got his first camera from his parents when he was 11 as a gift for passing an exam with flying colours. Thanks to his two uncles in Poland, whom he visited for holidays, he developed a passion for photography. One of them showed him how to develop pictures in an amateur darkroom created in the bathroom, the other bought him a camera – a Zenit 3M. While studying at the London College of Printing, he found a style of taking pictures on which he would later focus. He wanted to document reality, not create a new one.”
Chris Niedenthal. Photo: Grzegorz Śledź/PR
Having settled in Poland in his early twenties, Niedenthal started out as a freelancer documenting Poland under communism.
In 1978, shortly after the election of Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyła as pope, Niedenthal was the first photojournalist to report from the pontiff's hometown of Wadowice. A year later, during the pope’s pilgrimage to Poland, he took a photo that made it to the cover of Newsweek magazine.
Niedenthal was also the first foreign photojournalist to be allowed to enter the Gdańsk Shipyard during the 1980 strike, together with English journalist Michael Dobbs, according to the History Meeting House.
On December 14, 1981, a day after the imposition of martial law in Poland, Niedenthal took one of his most iconic shots: a photo of an armoured personnel carrier against the background of Warsaw's Moskwa (Moscow) cinema and a banner advertising the movie Apocalypse Now.
The History Meeting House further writes in Niedenthal’s profile that in 1984 Newsweek sent him on his first assignment outside Poland: to Budapest, Prague and Moscow.
In January 1985, he became Time magazine's photojournalist for Eastern Europe. Most often he took photographs in Prague, Budapest, Belgrade, and Sofia. He received a World Press Photo award in the People in the News category for his Time magazine cover photo of Hungarian communist leader János Kádár.
In 1993, after spending six years in Vienna, at Time’s office for Eastern Europe, Niedenthal returned to Poland.
"He authored several socially involved projects, including those about children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities and Polish-Jewish relations and tolerance towards the 'other,'" according to the History Meeting House.
In recent years, he returned to photojournalism.
The exhibition at the History Meeting House runs until April 7, 2023.
(mk/gs)