Photographer Adolfo Kaminsky, a man of a thousand lives who was the “king of false papers” in the service of the resistance and then anti-colonial movements, died on Monday January 9 at the age of 97, his daughter has told AFP with. Kaminsky was a “humanist, photographer and French resistance fighter specializing in the production of false papers,” summarized Sarah Kaminsky, who had traced her father’s life in the book “Adolfo Kaminsky, ein Fakerleben”.
Adolfo Kaminsky, a Jew of Argentine origin, was a “talented photographer (who) turned into a genius forger, supplying the resistance and hounding Jews with false papers before moving on to other things after the war,” the commemorative foundation hailed the Shoah. From the Resistance to the anti-colonial movements, Adolfo Kaminsky was in hiding the purveyor of false papers to all the struggles of the 20th century.
Also readExhibition: When the photographer Sylvie Lancrenon makes her cinema
Drancy Internment Camp
Son of Jewish-Russian immigrants, born in Buenos Aires, before coming to France he dreamed of becoming an artist and painter. But at 17 he joined the resistance in Paris after leaving the Drancy internment camp. He offers his knowledge of chemistry and photoengraving, useful in discoloring the inks used to make fake papers in a secret laboratory, and saves thousands of lives.
The beginning of a three-decade career, risking his life and disregarding his health, under the guise of a job as a photographer, all this quite banally in his workshops in the Latin Quarter or on the path. “I had the chance to save lives. I worked under the microscope day and night. I lost an eye, but I don’t regret anything,” emphasized the then under the pseudonym “Mr. Joseph”. Until the capitulation of Nazi Germany, he worked for the French secret services and helped Jewish survivors of the death camps to emigrate to Palestine.
Read alsoPhotographer Joel-Peter Witkin’s exhibition is not to the liking of Rambouillet town hall
He then becomes a political forger by becoming an expert in forged papers for all anti-colonial and anti-fascist struggles: FLN network during the Algerian War, anti-Franco in Spain, anti-Salazar in Portugal, anti-colonels struggle in Greece, Prague Spring , fights against dictatorships in Latin America, ANC, Guinea, Angola, American deserters in the Vietnam War and even up to Daniel Cohn-Bendit in May 1968… In 1971 he had ended his activities as a counterfeiter. His work as a photographer with a humanism reminiscent of Doisneau was exhibited in 2019 notably at the Museum of Art and History of Judaism.