Blazing a trail for the street photographers that0 fill your social feeds, Grażyna Rutowska is today regarded as one of the most influential photojournalists of the PRL era. Prolific in her output, the 38,000 images shot by her offer a compelling glimpse into the period, as well as an unvarnished view of life in Warsaw – its oddities, banalities and realities.

Born in Bytom in 1946, she moved to Warsaw in the mid-60s to study. Over the next couple of decades, she began documenting everyday life. Living at Żelazna 58/62, inside one of the blocks that formed part of the Za Żelazną Bramą housing estate, many of her photos were snapped directly in and around that neighbourhood.

An era of extraordinary change, it was during these times that Poland – and Warsaw in particular – saw a string of government investments that were supposedly to point towards a brighter future: for instance, the reconstruction of the Royal Castle, and the construction of landmarks such as Central Station, the Forum Hotel and Trasa Łazienkowska. Unsurprisingly, these figure highly in her work, but so too does the mundane. Often accompanied by her giant black poodle, Agat, Rutowska’s shots show several sides to a city at play and a city at work. A fascinating journey through time, one could argue that no other photographer captured so many of Warsaw’s different faces.