When I’m out shooting around Beijing, people often come up to me to ask if they can take a photo of me with their family.  Jessica Rinaldi & I took a break from holding babies to pose in front of the Bird’s Nest National Stadium on a typically smoggy day.

My first job was as a reporter at the Mid Sussex Times in England.  

At some point I realized that photographers spend 100% of their time outside the office & began to teach myself photography.  

I went to see an exhibition of Don McCullin’s photos and he became my first inspiration.

Babcia i Dziadzio, Warszawa, 1930s

The photo of my Polish grandfather Stanislaw was taken in a forced labor camp during the Second World War, before he was sent to Stutthof concentration camp by the Nazis. The purple “P” on his coat is to indicate he was a Polish prisoner.

My grandfather survived, but in addition to about three million Polish Jews, some 2.5 million non-Jewish Polish citizens were killed during the Second World War.

Respected British historian Norman Davies explains how the Polish holocaust came to be largely written out of history in his great book “Rising ‘44, The Battle for Warsaw.”

When I was a kid, my mother told me the stories in this book, but they had not yet been published in Poland or the West.

I became fascinated by other untold stories in history.  We would drive through Eastern Europe to visit my Polish family every year throughout the 1970s & 80s, in the final decades of the Cold War.  These adventures made me want to become a journalist.

Washington Post article about the Warsaw Uprising

New York Times review of “Rising ‘44″

Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles

Stutthof concentration camp

Oscar-winning Polish film director Andrzej Wajda

CNN documentary about the Warsaw Uprising

Warsaw Uprising links