Szkic o artyście-fotografiku Menachemie Kipnisie

Abstract

The aim of the article is to present Menachem Kipnis – an ethnographer, musicologist, collector and writer – as a photographer of the interwar Jewish community in Poland. In the interwar period, Kipnis became famous mainly as a publisher of Jewish folk songs and a humorist. He collaborated with newspapers published in Yiddish "Hajnt" [Warsaw] and "Forwerts" [New York] and in Polish, among others "Nasz Przegląd" and "Rano" [both published in Warsaw]. However, it was only after the war that his photographs of Jewish residents of the II Polish Republic were rediscovered. It became important to look at them from a different perspective, not only as testimonies of the exterminated Jewish world, but as reportage photos and portraits. The impulse of the description was to draw attention to the motivation that Kipnis kept while creating them with the possibility of their re-description as press photos, following poetics requirements.