Stanisław Mucha (photographer)

Stanisław Mucha as a soldier in the First World War

Auschwitz-Birkenau (February / March 1945)

Stanisław Mucha (born May 1, 1895 in Olszówka , Powiat Limanowski , Austria-Hungary ; died June 2, 1976 in Krakow ) was a Polish photographer .

Life

Stanisław Mucha became a soldier in the Polish Legion during World War I and worked as a regimental photographer. Mucha was also a soldier in the Polish-Soviet War in 1921. From 1922 he worked as a photographer for Kraków's Nowości Ilustrowane and was a permanent correspondent for a number of national and international newspapers. From 1928 he had his own studio in Krakow. Mucha made city and architecture photographs for Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz as well as art photographs.

After the liberation of Poland in 1945, a Red Army investigative commission commissioned him to document the Auschwitz concentration camp . One hundred photographs were taken. Mucha later presented an album with 38 photos and an introduction to the Auschwitz Museum . More photos from the series are now in the Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (IPN) in Warsaw . His photo of the camp's gatehouse , which became a symbol of Auschwitz and the Holocaust , gained particular fame .

In 1946 the former resistance fighter Teresa Lasocka-Estreicher came to him with the negative film with the four recordings that Alberto Errera , the prisoner in the Sonderkommando , had secretly made in 1944 of the cremation and the way to the gas chamber. Mucha made prints and retouched the blurred photos taken from an oblique angle with the intention of making what was happening more clearly.

Works (selection)

Ewa Piotrowska: Stanisław Mucha. Photographer-dokumentalista i miłośnik Krakowa . Krakow: Muzeum Historii Fotografii im. Walerego Rzewuskiego, 2007 ISBN 978-83-89177-36-0 .

literature

Christoph Hamann : Gatehouse Auschwitz Birkenau. A picture "makes" history , in: Gerhard Paul : The Century of Pictures. Picture atlas . Volume 1. 1900 to 1949 . Göttingen: V&R, 2009, pp. 682-689.
Marek Maszczak, Wanda Mossakowska: Fotograficzna panorama Krakowa Stanisława Muchy z 1937 roku , in: Rocznik Krakowski, Volume 67 (2001), pp. 117–125, ISSN 0080-3499.

Web links

Commons : Stanislaw Mucha - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Literature by and about Stanisław Mucha in the WorldCat bibliographic database

Ewa Piotrowska: Stanisław Mucha | November 16 - March 2, 2008 photographer - dokumentalista i miłośnik Krakowa, czyli zwyczajna opowieść o niezwykłym człowieku , at Muzeum Historii Fotografii im. Walerego Rzewuskiego w Krakowie (mhf), 2007

Individual evidence

↑ Short biography with Christoph Hamann: Torhaus Auschwitz Birkenau , 2009, p. 684.
↑ Janina Struk: Photographing the Holocaust - Interpretations of the Evidence . London: Tauris, 2004 ISBN 1-86064-546-1 , p. 118, fn. 89. In 2003,
Georges Didi-Huberman did not know who had done the retouching (see: Pictures in spite of everything . Translation into German. Munich, 2007 ISBN 978-3-7705-4020-4 , p. 58ff.)

personal data
SURNAME	Mucha, Stanislaw
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Polish photographer
DATE OF BIRTH	May 1, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH	Olszówka , Powiat Limanowski
DATE OF DEATH	June 2nd 1976
Place of death	Krakow

[1] Short biography with Christoph Hamann: Torhaus Auschwitz Birkenau , 2009, p. 684.

[2] Janina Struk: Photographing the Holocaust - Interpretations of the Evidence . London: Tauris, 2004 ISBN 1-86064-546-1 , p. 118, fn. 89. In 2003,
Georges Didi-Huberman did not know who had done the retouching (see: Pictures in spite of everything . Translation into German. Munich, 2007 ISBN 978-3-7705-4020-4 , p. 58ff.)