Director: Dariusz Jablonski
Script: Andrzej Bodek, Arnold Mostowicz, Dariusz Jablonski
Photography: Tomasz Michalowski
Editor: Milenia Fiedler
Sound: Jozef Drus
Music: Michal Lorenc
Production Design: Pawel Mirowski
Producer: Dariusz Jablonski
Co-Producer: Wolfgang Katzke
Production: Apple Film Production in co-production with Broadcast AV, TVP, Canal+ polska, APF and in cooperation with ARTE for MDR.
Distribution: Apple Film Production
Distribution Germany: Broadcast AV
Selected Filmography Dariusz Jablonski: Lusttrant, 1983; Cockroaches, 1984; Help, 1985; Józko, 1985; Visit of an Elderly Lady, 1986; An Elegy for a Lady, 1989; The last Sabbath, 1990; Mondo Migliore, 1991, Bal, 1991; Artur Brauner, 1993.
In 1987 a complete colour slide series of the Jewish ghetto in the Polish city of Lódz was found in a Salzburg second hand bookshop. The pictures had been taken by Walter Genewein, the Nazi financial manager of the ghetto. Polish documaker Dariusz Jablonski confronts the slides and the accompanying meticulous notes of Genewerin with the memories of Warsaw publicist and Holocaust survivor Arnold Mostowicz. The interviews with Mostowicz and the shots of contemporary Lódz are all in black and white. "The Photographer" is also a film about remembering, or rather the codifying of memories. The reversal of conventions (resembling “Schindler’s List”) initially seems like just an effect; the archive material makes a far more vivid and truthful impression than the direct footage, which is somewhat reserved. In the end though, Jablonski’s formal insistence allows the film to work on a profound level: the horror already aestheticised by museum culture is made palpable; Genewein’s comments reveal cruelty in their precise banality, while the legacy of the survivors and witnesses emerges as something fragile and precious.