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Sylwester “Kris” Braun is among the most important photographers of the Warsaw Uprising, and many of his images have become part of the collective imagination of August and September 1944. The exhibition presents original prints from the collection of the Museum of Warsaw, reconstructing not only the photographer’s work in the fighting capital, but also the later history of the photographs: their concealment, rediscovery, dispersal, and incorporation into the museum collection. An important thread is also the figure of Berta Weissberger, Braun’s assistant and the author of some of the photographs, whose story allows the iconography of the Uprising to be seen as a process shaped by biographies, institutions, and later historical narratives.

The exhibition design is based on working with the materiality of the photographic archive and with the very process through which historical narratives are formed. The central element of the space consists of long, dark display cases resembling photographic light tables, on which reconstructed sequences of negatives are shown alongside a map of Braun and Weissberger’s routes through Warsaw during the Uprising. Braun’s photographs are presented not only as selected images, but also as strips of frames arranged in their original order — a record of movement, decisions, and successive acts of looking. The exhibition leads from the richness of the archival material, through curated thematic micro-series, to images that have acquired iconic status, such as the photographs of the shell explosion on the Prudential building. The exhibition architecture reinforces this process of selection and abstraction: it shows how, from a multitude of photographs, through successive stages of ordering, interpretation, and the consolidation of memory, only a few images enter history.