Mikołaj Grynberg

Mikołaj Grynberg is a photographer and writer fascinated with portraits, both visual and literary. In his work he frequently documents the fates of Jews. Grynberg graduated with a degree in psychology. He was born on 21st June 1966 in Warsaw.

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Mikołaj Grynberg, photo: courtesy of artist

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Mikołaj Grynberg

He started out as a photojournalist, but quite quickly decided to take up studio photography instead and switched to medium format. In an interview for Kampus Radio, Grynberg said that to him, photography was in fact an excuse to meet with the people he would portray. In 2004 he started the project Many Women. As he said in an interview for fotopolis.pl:

It started with a photograph of my mom, Daniela. After her death I’d constantly come across this one photo of her that I took several months before she died. It was kind of a joke back then – my father had recently recovered from a health crisis, so me and my mother decided to unwind by taking pictures of her as a widow. She’s wearing black lace on hear head and looks very noble...

The first exhibition of the series took place in 2005 in Luksfera Gallery. Grynberg, however, did not stop there – in subsequent years, he kept on photographing women he met all around the world. As he said about the reception of the project in the aforementioned interview:

If you have a show in a gallery, you won’t find anything out. People will come and tell you it’s great, but no one would come up to tell you your work was shit. However, when I hung my photos at a train station in Rio de Janeiro, I did get a real interaction with the audience. People would come up to me and straightforwardly tell me: this is cool, but that one sucks.

The album Many Women was published by Gazeta Wyborcza in 2009. In the same year, Grynberg started his cycle Auschwitz, What Am I Doing Here? that was presented as an exhibition at Pauza Gallery and Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in 2010. In 2012, the project was displayed at the Swedish Parliament. Pauza Foundation and Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum published the series as an album in 2010.

In his series, Grynberg took blurry portraits of the visitors of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the extermination camp’s architecture, trying to answer the titular question in his conversations with the people he portrayed. As Adam Mazur wrote in Decydujący Moment: Nowe Zjawiska w Fotografii Polskiej po 2000 Roku (The Decisive Moment: New Phenomena in Polish Photography After 2000, trans. NS):

Grynberg’s foggy, blurry photographs are proof that it is possible to tackle the difficult history of the place using contemporary art. The project [...] gave rise to vivid reactions of the critics, photographers and artists who deal with memory and history in their work.

Mikołaj Grynberg - Works - Image Gallery

Embeded gallery style

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In 2012, Grynberg debuted as an author, publishing the book Ocaleni z XX Wieku (Survivors of the 20th Century, trans. NS). The book comprises of 25 interviews with Polish Jews that immigrated to Israel. As Grynberg himself wrote, he intended his work to be a counterbalance to the scientific narratives about the Holocaust and the relations between Poles and Jews. He certainly succeeded in that respect: in the interview opening the book, Samuel Willenberg tells Grynberg how he functioned both in the Jewish and Polish worlds, engaging in street fights with both communities, and accompanying his Polish friends in their trips to places ‘Jews wouldn’t go to’. Grynberg’s interlocutors share their memories of everyday life pre-World War II, but also Polish anti-Semitism, violence, war trauma, but also the coexistence of Poles and Jews and friendships. As the author emphasised, he was very well aware that he had to hurry up – the people he talked to were among the last qitnesses to be alive. The book sold well and had a reedition in 2018.

Grynberg’s next book, Oskarżam Auschwitz: Opowieści Rodzinne (I Blame Auschwitz: Family Stories, trans. NS) is a collection of interviews, too. This time, the author decided to look for children of people who survived the Holocaust. People who talk to Grynberg have lived lives that were overshadowed by the trauma. His interlocutors speak mostly of suffering, constant anxiety and sorrow.

In 2017, the author published Rejwach (Uproar, trans. NS), a book that is difficult to ascribe to one genre. In an interview for the Jewish magazine Chidusz the writer said:

I wrote fiction that turned out to be true. Most of these stories came to me through people. Sometimes I’d also remember something from the past and write fiction inspired by the recollection. Later on it would turn out the stories were in fact true… People would appear and tell me they were the protagonists of my writings.

Rejwach was nominated for the prestigious Nike Literary Award in 2018. The book was staged in 2018 in the Jewish Theatre in Warsaw.

In 2018, Grynberg published the non-fiction book Księga Wyjścia (Exodus, trans. NS), another collection of interviews. He talked to Jews who were forced to leave Poland in March 1968, when the communist government organised an anti-Semitic hate campaign.

In 2020, Grynberg published Poufne (Confidential, trans. NS), a fiction book inspired by the lives of the author’s closest family.

In an interview for Gazeta Wyborcza, Grynberg said:

It’s not like writing my book makes me feel better or anything, although some readers tend to think that. Writing has nothing to do with healing and there is no catharsis. I see it as sharing stories so that we can understand each other better. I believe that if everyone opened the doors to their world just a little bit, we could all finally have some more air.

Originally written in Polish & translated by Natalia Sajewicz. Latest update: January 2021

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auchwitz - what Am I Doing Here

Many Women

Different People

Many Women 18 to Be precise