Adolfo Kaminsky, the ace of forgers, died at 97

Adolfo Kaminsky, self-portrait at the age of 19, Paris, 1944, ©Adolfo Kaminsky (l.) – dolfo Kaminsky at home, in Paris, in 1997, ©Leïla Kaminsky (r.)

Discreet, with a rare elevation of soul and a bit of a dreamer, Adolfo Kaminsky died in Paris at the age of 97, on January 9. Photographer, resistance fighter and forger of genius, this native of Buenos Aires, where he was born in 1925, joined the Resistance at the age of 17. He then became an expert in making false papers in Paris thanks to his knowledge of chemistry acquired when he was an apprentice dyer in Normandy.

Kaminsky notably knows how to erase the red ink used by the Vichy administration to stamp the word “JEW” on Jewish documents. Exhausting work: “The calculation is simple. In one hour I make thirty false papers. If I sleep for an hour, thirty people will die…” he says in A life of a forger (Calmann-Lévy), the book published by his daughter Sarah Kaminsky in 2009. Among those he managed to save from certain death were residents of the Marais.

A Jew of Argentine origin, once interned in Drancy, he saved thousands of lives until the Liberation. During the following three decades, this man with deep humanist convictions put his know-how at the service of other causes: support for the FLN, the revolutionary struggles of South America, the decolonization wars of Africa, opposition to dictators of Spain, Portugal, Greece. Still, he refuses to be paid. In 1971, he made his last false paper, and put a definitive end to this activity.

At the same time, the exceptional forger constructed – always with total discretion – a beautiful photographic work, with framing as precise as his forged documents. The Museum of Art and History of Judaism (MahJ) paid tribute to him in the fall of 2019 with a beautiful exhibition. After the Liberation, Kaminsky took thousands of photos, taking a chiaroscuro look at the world and Paris in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. What interests him is the popular. From the flea markets of Saint-Ouen to the neon lights of Pigalle, he captures with simplicity the looks and silhouettes of Paris: lovers, workers, prostitutes, second-hand dealers, second-hand book sellers, in Paris, Saint-Ouen, Marseille or in the Algerian South . We think of Brassaï and Doisneau. Its snapshots that merge with the search for truth.

At the start of 2022, the Paris Center town hall had the good idea of ​​presenting part of his work. His images had been hung – as it should be for a street photographer – in the street, on three sides of the gates of the Paris Center town hall. We could then delve one last time into the little-known work of a discreet photographer, Adolfo Kaminsky, born almost a century ago at the end of the world and whom Le Marais Mood had the immense honor of meeting on several occasions. Hats off, the artist!

Text: Axel G.

20.01.23