The Masked City

Marcin Bradke about the exhibition: “I’m a man who just can’t sit still. Covid-19 stopped me dead in my tracks and made me stay at home. I couldn’t accept that, and that is why I decided to record this time of plague with my camera. I was born during the smallpox epidemic in 1963, and I am grateful to people who documented these events. Therefore, I decided to record this kind of “demonic attack” on our city to the best of my ability. I took several hundred photographs, showing a deserted city and people who did not give up. I’m not a photographer or an artist. I’m just a journalist who likes to take pictures. It was challenging for me to choose these twenty pictures that we present to you today. They’re not perfect, and I’ve probably missed a lot of the better ones. However, this was not my assumption – it was not so much about artistic excellence as about showing you this difficult time through my journalist’s eyes”.

Biography

Marcin Bradke – graduate of Polish Studies, long-time journalist of TVP Wrocław, professional voice-over artist and presenter. Author of reportages, programmes and documentaries, specialising in historical documentaries. Author of the Prawdziwy koniec wojny [True End of the War] series, as well as Breslau Rudolfa Tauera [Rudolf Tauer’s Breslau], Królowa Panoram [The Queen of Panoramas] (about the Racławice Panorama) and Tak się nie godzi. Opowieść o Piotrze Bednarzu [That is unfair. The Story of Piotr Bednarz], Zamordowane dzieciństwo [The Murdered Childhood] (a biography of writer, playwright and poet Stanisław Srokowski, whose stories served as the basis for Wojciech Smarzowski’s Hatred, as well as his latest film Marzyciel [The Dreamer] about Kornel Morawiecki. Marcin Bradke was also responsible for creating the Labirynty kultury [Labyrinths of Culture] series of fictionalised TV programmes, narrated by Prof. Bogusław Bednarek, Wrocław-based Polish language scholar, as well as Pociąg do historii [Train to History] and Świadkowie historii [Witnesses of History] series, carried out in cooperation with the “Remembrance and Future” Centre. Marcin Bradke won the Journalist of the Year (2011) title, he also belongs to the Polish Filmmakers Association. He wrote Pokój na wieży [The Room in the Tower] anthology of horror stories, as well as the afterword to Gustav Meyrink’s Noc Walpurgi [Walpurgis Night], published by the Ossolineum. In 2017 he made his debut with his collection of short stories entitled Pies o żółtych oczach [Dog with Yellow Eyes] and at the turn of 2018 and 2019, he published his first novel – Gniew [Anger]. For several years, he has been working at the “Remembrance and Future” Centre.