The photograph was taken by Sylwester “Kris” Braun, who graduated in geodesy from Warsaw University of Technology, and was 35 at the time of the Uprising. He applied to the Office of Information and Propaganda in the first days of fighting, but insisted on retaining ownership of his negatives, promising to supply the press with prints in return.
Braun was meticulous about the technical aspects of his work. Despite restricted access to water and electricity, he never submitted his negatives to a laboratory. He developed a method of achieving small grain while preserving the details in shadow, and worked with a Leica camera.
Out of the 3,000 photographs he took during the Uprising, only half survived. In his home laboratory, he managed to develop some of his negatives documenting wartime destruction, and the rest he hid away.
Braun never trained as a war photographer. His colleagues saw him as a lucky man who always managed to be in the right place at the right time as interesting things were happening. One of his most famous Uprising photographs was taken from the roof of his house at 28 Kopernika Street. He would often shoot the same subject several times, and after taking the photograph above, he had to hang on to a chimney to stop himself being swept off by the intense blast – the building targeted by the shell stood just 600 metres away.
A few days after the capitulation of Warsaw, in early October 1944, Braun decided to leave the city, returning only to collect his hidden materials the following year. Subsequently, he emigrated to Sweden, then later moved to the United States. He donated his archives to the Museum of Warsaw in 1981. He died in Warsaw.
Originally written in Polish, translated by AG, edited by MB, Dec 2018
