About the Exhibit

This exhibition brings together two voices of Polish art: the photographer Grzegorz Lityński and the poet Barbara Gruszka-Zych. Each has wandered far within their own landscapes — Grzegorz through the contours of the world, capturing lives and moments with a precise, almost tender eye; Barbara through language, shaping more than twenty volumes of poetry that resonate with memory, longing, and reflection. In recent years, their paths have converged, and a new realm has emerged — a place where image whispers to word, and word answers with light. They call it Light and Whispers.

Their first shared journey, a biography of the filmmaker Krzysztof Zanussi (2024), wove together more than two hundred photographs with poetry and prose, layering life upon life, gaze upon gaze. Later came “Kiss the World” (2025), a photopoetic volume where Barbara’s meditations on love, loss, and mortality find echo in Grzegorz’s symbolic, black-and-white images, each frame a pause, a breath, a reflection. Here, photographs become poetry, and poetry becomes photograph, and between them, a space opens — luminous, delicate, unforgettable. Now they turn to Silesia, a region in Poland — one hundred portraits, each captured by Grzegorz’s lens, each met with Barbara’s poems and prose, responding to the gestures of hands, the glances of eyes, the silent stories that dwell in faces. The forthcoming book, “Stop Time. Silesian Kaleidoscope 1919–2018” (2026, in Polish and German), moves like a river of voices, reflecting Silesia’s identity, its memory, its quiet, persistent passage through time.

Some of the photographs and poems in this exhibition emerge from their earlier Polish photopoetry works — the contemplative “Kiss the World” and the many-voiced “Stop Time. Silesian Kaleidoscope” — carrying their original rhythm, silence, and light into this shared space. Yet the greater part of their photopoetry works on display were born for this exhibition, a delicate dialogue between image and word, forming the luminous core of Light and Whispers.

An Exhibit Opening reception will take place on March 25, 2026. Learn more >>

About the Artists

Grzegorz Lityński is a photographer, exhibition curator, and lecturer who teaches postgraduate programs, conducts workshops, and leads open-air photography courses in Polish, German, and English. His work focuses on people and the communities they inhabit, often combining modern history with intimate portraits of Holocaust survivors, participants in freedom struggles against communism in Poland, and other witnesses of history.

Lityński’s photography has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the USA, Germany, and Poland, including the Ukrainian National Museum in Chicago, the Minnesota State Capitol, the University of St. Thomas, the Chicago History Museum, Dwell Studio (Chicago), the Deutsches Polen-Institut (Darmstadt, Germany), the Knesset (Jan. 2025, group exhibition), Kunstverein Oerlinghausen (Germany), the National Cultural Center in Warsaw, and the European Capital of Culture events in his hometown of Wrocław, Poland.

A seasoned documentary photographer, Lityński has traveled to over seventy countries, from Australia to Bhutan, Botswana, Laos, and Spitsbergen. He was a fellow at the Akademie am Tönsberg (2023) and in 2014 won the BZWBK Press Photo Award in the “Everyday Life” category. In addition to his photographic work, he is the author of two academic textbooks on photography and the history of modern surgery, including “Highlights in the History of Laparoscopy” (1996, Bernert Verlag, Frankfurt/Main), based on interviews with fifty pioneering surgeons from the USA, Germany, France, and the UK.

Barbara Gruszka-Zych is a poet, reporter, writer, and literary critic, and the author of over twenty volumes of poetry. Her 2012 collection Gray Like a Sparrow was hailed by critic Tomasz Burek as one of the ten most important books published in Poland since 1989. She has also authored acclaimed reportage and memoirs, including “My Poet: Memories of a Friendship with Czesław Miłosz” (Polish-American Poet, Nobel Prize winner), “Such a Beautiful Life: Portrait of Wojciech Kilar, Family Life of the Zanussis: Conversations with Elżbieta and Krzysztof,” and “My Important People: Private Portraits.”

Gruszka-Zych has received numerous awards for her work, particularly for her interviews and reportage. She was honored with the Brązowy Medal Gloria Artis for Merit to Culture (2011) from the Minister of Culture, the Main Award (2012) from the Association of Polish Journalists, and the Father Jan Twardowski Award for poetry (2015). Her contributions to culture and the arts were further recognized with the Karol Miarka Award from the Marshal of the Silesian Voivodeship (2023) and the Marshal of the Silesian Voivodeship Award (2024).

She has also received prestigious scholarships from the Vienna Janineum Foundation (2002), the John Paul II Foundation in Rome (2003), and the Heinrich & Jane Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation in Lavigny, Switzerland (2014).

Registration and government ID are required to visit the exhibit. Please email harriman@columbia.edu no later than 48 hrs before entry to register.