From 7 March until 8 June 2008 the Jewish Historical Museum is
organising an exhibition of photographs by Kurt Lubinski
(1899-1969). Although this German émigré photographer is now
relatively unknown, he gained a significant reputation as a
successful photojournalist for his travel reportages in the 1920s
and 1930s, initially in Germany and later in the Netherlands.
Lubinski began his career at the end of the 1920s as a photographer
at the Ullstein Verlag in Berlin. In 1933 he fled Nazi Germany and
emigrated to the Netherlands. He received commissions from Dutch
illustrated weeklies and was one of the first photojournalists to
travel through the remote areas of the Soviet Union (Siberia and
Central Asia), Africa and the American Deep South. He also
travelled extensively in Europe, from Gibraltar to the Shetland
Islands. In the 1930s Lubinski's photographs were among the first
to acquaint the general public with images of strange cultures and
exotic peoples.
Lubinski's countless reportages, the texts for which he wrote
himself, speak of his great empathy for the underprivileged such as
poor Russian peasants, nomads in Kazakhstan, dispossessed Native
Americans and black street sweepers in the USA. People are always
central to his photography. He observed how, throughout the world,
the authenticity of age-old cultures was threatened by
modernisation, industrialisation, urbanisation and political
developments. His photographs remain, in our age of globalisation,
a silent witness to a world that has largely disappeared.
Lubinski escaped to England before the outbreak of the Second World
War and in 1943 he emigrated to the United States. There he
abandoned photography, his archive was lost and his name fell into
obscurity.
The JHM hopes that this exhibition will restore him to his rightful
place in the history of Dutch photography. It is the first time
that his work will be exhibited. The majority of the photographs in
the exhibition are vintage prints from the collection of
Spaarnestad Photo. The exhibition coincides with the publication of
a book on Lubinski by our guest curator and art and photography
historian Louis Zweers.
For more information and/or images please contact the
Communications Department:
T: +31 (0)20 531 0370 F: +31 (0)20 531 0311 E: Communications
Department
The JHM is open daily from 11.00 to 17.00