Warsaw : 1945, Today and Tommorow

Warsaw -- an ordinary city. With everyday preoccupations and joys. With the narrow congested street of Nowy Swiat and the broad Lazienkowska Thoroughfare, with the quiet and secluded narrow streets of the Old Town where memories linger and the vast Defilad Square -- planned so as to leave plenty of room for future growth -- across which the wind howls. This book recalls the face of Warsaw as it was in the first months after liberation. There are very many photographs from the period. Some of them are widely known and have been reproduced many times already, some are here published for the first time. The ruins of Warsaw have been photographed by everybody. This urge to photograph the ruins of Warsaw stemmed not only from their sinister beauty but also from the social need to record historic facts, to preserve the truth about those days. Future books about Warsaw will increasingly contain new photos of projects which we know today from blueprints submitted to architectural contests. But the pictures from 1945 will remain. They will still be needed to understand Warsaw. An ordinary city. (Courtsey of keymedia)