"AT THE OCCASION. Unknown Photographs by Romuald Broniark" is a new exhibition at the History Meeting House, presenting more than one hundred photographs from the impressive oeuvre of Romuald Broniark, photographer and photojournalist of the "Przyjaźń" weekly. The curators of the exhibition are Katarzyna Broniarek-Niemczycka and Filip Niedenthal.

Romuald Broniarek - like any thoroughbred photojournalist in the People's Republic of Poland - took pictures for print, knowing which ones would appeal to the editorial staff of Friendship and be published, and the 'unnecessary' ones, captured while pursuing the main topic. It was clear to the curators of the exhibition that the magazine for which the photographer worked for many years (the organ of the Polish-Soviet Friendship Society) was a propaganda tube of the communist authorities.

When we started looking through archival issues of the magazine, the scale of this hypocrisy proved striking. This did not, however, change the perception of Broniarek's photographs - a talented photographer whose work is worth popularising - emphasise the curators, Katarzyna Broniarek-Niemczycka and Filip Niedenthal.

The photographer and photojournalist left a huge legacy, tens of thousands of photographs. For two decades after the fall of communism, his photographs were not shown in Poland and the Eastern Bloc countries, despite their aesthetic and documentary qualities. His choice to be associated with a magazine with a strongly crystallised ideological line meant that he was forgotten after the breakthrough period. In fact, he himself did not bother to have his name appear in the press. He stopped photographing professionally in 1990.

Romuald Broniarek was a bit rough around the edges, always walking around with a camera in his hand and fond of using blunt words. As a child he was given a simple Baby Box Tengor camera, with which he took his first photographs. His time growing up was during the years of German occupation and post-war poverty. He lost his mother at an early age, who died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After the war, when the communists took over the country, Romuald wanted to become a professional photographer. He tried to find himself in the new reality. His beginnings were difficult: he was a helper at a photographic workshop in Jelenia Góra in the Recovered Territories, a driver at a Muranów building site, a lab technician at the Central Photographic Agency, a soldier-miner in Wojkowice Komorne (during his compulsory military service); it was only in 1955 that he managed to get a position as a photojournalist for "Przyjaźni". His career lasted 35 years, until the closure of the magazine.

He kept his archive in the garage. There were many boxes of prints and negatives there (the children of the family were allowed to look into them - carefully and respectfully - although it didn't look like Uncle Maldek had a devout attitude to his own work). He did not want to talk about his work, he had to be persuaded, dragged by the tongue," recalls Katarzyna Broniarek-Niemczycka, co-curator of the exhibition.

More than 20 years ago, part of his archive - around 1400 photographs - was scanned and made available by the FORUM agency. In 2006, boxes of negatives and slides were donated by the author to the collection of the KARTA Centre Foundation as part of an archival intervention. Only some of the 80,000 frames were scanned and described. In 2010, Broniorek's photographs were shown at a group exhibition at the History Meeting House, 'Cztery pory Gierka. Poland 1970-1980 in photographs from the FORUM Agency, and in 2013 'Free Time. Photographs' at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art.

Broniarka's name unexpectedly appeared on the occasion of the launch of the 2018 edition of Polish Vogue. On the cover, homegrown supermodels Małgosia Bela and Anja Rubik posed for Juergen Teller against the backdrop of the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw and a Volga, a Soviet-made car.