History In Focus

About Chris Niedenthal

Chris Niedenthal was born and raised in London, England, to Polish parents. He studied photography at the London College of Printing. Always interested in his heritage, he traveled to Poland in 1973 on a whim, thinking it would be only for a month or two—but he stayed for 51 years and counting!

The election of the Polish Pope, John Paul II, in 1978 was the turning point for Niedenthal’s photojournalistic career as Poland became a major topic in the Western media. That is when Newsweek came into his life. He was at the right place at the right time when, in the summer of 1980, the strike at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, with Lech Wałęsa at its helm, began the long road to the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. The imposition of Martial Law in Poland in December 1981 was the next turning point for the country and for Niedenthal’s career. All these events were of great significance to a young photojournalist who, rather unexpectedly, had his hands full of work.

When Time Magazine recruited Niedenthal in 1985, his area of work expanded to all of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and eventually the Soviet Union. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, he reported on political changes in Germany. The whole year of 1989 was to become his toughest assignment.  In the 90s, he covered Poland, Eastern Europe, and Ukraine and occasionally freelanced for the German news weekly Der Spiegel.

During the last 8 years, until 2023, under the rule of the conservative Law & Justice government in Poland, sensing political unrest again, Niedenthal decided it was time to dust off his camera and return to the streets—this time taking pictures only for his own archives.

Chris Niedenthal has held several major exhibitions in Warsaw, where he resides, and other Polish cities, published photographic albums and wrote an autobiography. He has no thoughts of retirement, which, as he says, is something photographers don’t do.