Publishing Department

„A year before her death, Julia Pirotte had donated her modest archival collection to the Jewish Historical Institute. It consists primarily of a few hundred pictures of her authorship. Most of the photographs come from the forties and fifties. Only some of them were taken later. I myself possess one more of her photos from the late seventies. It presents my two-year-old daughter. (...) Probably many more photos by Julia Pirotte are in private hands. We know that she was the first photojournalist who was in Kielce just after the pogrom in 1946. Most of the photographs taken by her at the time — and there were over a hundred — were confiscated by the Office of Security. Probably, they were destroyed.

Julia Pirotte’s photos were shown in Belgium, France and the United States, and in the eighties also in Poland. However, they did not gain wide publicity. I suppose that their author was a very humble person and did not know how to take care of a wider public presence of her works.

Presented collection of photographs includes remarkable portraits, in which images of faces are complemented by the hands of the photographed. Hands can say a lot about a person. Pirotte took many pictures of reportage photographs, depicting soldiers of the French resistance movement, workers, kibbutzniks. And pictures of old women and children, portraits of Tuwim, Picasso, Edith Piaf, Eluard, sister Mindla, as if sculpted in light and half-tones, are those which appeal to me the most.”

Paweł Śpiewak