3 minute read

The Cold War Album by Arthur Grace

from Ojai Magazine. Fall 2022

by Ojai Magazine

from Ojai Magazine. Fall 2022, page 120

The House on Hermitage

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana

From 1977-1989, Ojai resident Arthur Grace was one of only a small corps of Western photographers with ongoing access to Soviet bloc countries behind the Iron Curtain

Arthur Grace’s Cold War Album

photography and words by

ARTHUR GRACE

“Even though the photographs in my book offer only the merest glimpse of the Cold War from one photographer’s perspective, I hope they will serve as a historical reminder of what autocracy looked like then, and could look like again in the not-so distant future.”

– Arthur Grace from the foreword to his book, Communism(s): A Cold War Album.

**Pro-Solidarity demonstrators in Warsaw are tear gassed by paramilitary police during country-wide protests on August 31, 1982.**

**A marching unit of young women await the start of the May Day parade in East Berlin in 1977. Behind them are posters of East Germany’s leaders.**

**Above: A young couple share a quiet moment sitting on park benches during martial law in Poland in 1982.**

**Women stand in line outside a grocery store in Warsaw in 1981. Sometimes people would get into a line not knowing what was being sold.**

Two men trying to sell used electronics at a flea market in Warsaw in 1989. A wide variety of goods were sold by everyday people at these events, including used shoes, clothes, toys and household goods. Generally, there were no booths or stands set up, just individuals standing holding their used items or laying them out on the ground in front of them.

**Factory worker having soup and bread lunch in Nova Huta, Poland, in 1989.**

**Schoolboys walking home with groceries in Sighisoara, Romania, in 1977.**

**Above: A young man waiting for a bus in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, in 1983. Above him is a poster of the country’s Communist dictator Marshal Tito who died in 1980.**

I learned quickly that often while I was busy observing what was in front of me, someone from State Security was busy observing me.

**Above: A plainclothes secret policeman surprises three Warsaw college students after observing them talking to a Western journalist during martial law in 1982.**

**Above: Contestants in the Miss Poland contest wait for their number to be called to go on stage. The event took place in Warsaw during martial law in 1982.**

The most newsworthy photographs I took during the time I was covering the Soviet bloc were the ones I shot during the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland in 1981 and life under martial law in 1982. The courage and unwavering defiance of the Poles was inspirational to people in Eastern Europe and around the world. Seven years later the Berlin Wall fell.

**Top: Protesters gather at dusk at a location in Warsaw for a peaceful demonstration against the imposition of martial law. The “V” hand sign was a symbol of resistance.**

Communism(s): A Cold War Album by Arthur Grace

Published By Damiani Editore @damiani_books (@arcanabooks)

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