Henryk Makarewicz & Wiktor Pental

Henryk Makarewicz (1917-1984) was a student at the Catholic University of Lublin. He completed his studies in 1939. In the interwar period he was associated with the Lublin photographic community – from 1937 he took an active part in the work of the Lublin Photographic Society. He was one of the authors of the photographic documentation of the bombing of Lublin in September 1939. In 1944 he joined the military company Czołówka. He accompanied the soldiers to Berlin with his camera. After the end of World War II, he works for the Polish Film Chronicle and the Documentary Film Studio. In 1953 he was delegated to Nowa Huta with the task of documenting the construction of the city as well.

Wiktor Pental (1920 – 2013) was born in Woroniszki, a village in Nowogródzka Province. He became interested in photography in high school when he started using his classmates’ cameras. During World War II, he was a soldier in the Polish army and a camera always accompanied him into battle, first at the front, then underground. In 1950 he was sentenced to one year in prison as an enemy of the Polish People’s Republic for his loyalty during the wartime resistance, but only served seven months. After Pental’s release from prison, he worked as a builder when the new industrial town of Nowa Huta came into being and had a rare opportunity to document those streets near Kraków, which saw constant and ambitious construction during the 1950s.

Together with Henryk Makarewicz, he developed a unique photographic account documenting the build-up of Nowa Huta from the ground up and revealing how his account shaped the community that moved there to man the nearby steel mills.