Polish photography chronically suffers from a lack of figures, if not legendary, then at least of great stature. One of the few shrouded in an aura of contemporary authority is Krzysztof Miller. Born in 1962, Miller, like many of his contemporaries, not only participated in the events of martial law, but also actively began to convulse the decline of communist Poland with photography. In the second half of the 1980s, he approached the circle of...
In the context of Arnold van Gennep's scholarly dissertation "Les rites de passages", which is, as the subtitle states, "A Systematic Study of Ceremonies", the choice of baptisms, communions, weddings and funerals as subjects of a photographic series under the title borrowed from the French anthropologist seems to be a most justifiable step. However, in Przemyslaw Pokrycki's extensive project, carried out since 2005, funeral rituals have become...
Writing that Wojciech Zawadzki was a great photographer is the same truism as writing that a great poet was, for example, a certain Slovakian. This everyone knows. Like any "seriousness," Wojciech Zawadzki continues to have an impact even after his death, which came for him in 2017. Less than five years later, or more precisely, from February 8 to March 18, 2022, in the extraordinary...
Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Central Europe... Whatever we call this area marked at its inception by both Byzantine and Frankish Empire influences, thinking about it triggers emotions over and over again, from uncertainty to nostalgia to awe, and sometimes a whole diverse range of feelings, as seen in literary or cinematic narratives describing the European phenomenon. For an outside observer, the...
It's a strange feeling when a man living in the same time as you presents you with the archaeology of your time, your country, your history. I first saw Christoph Grill's work five years ago on a table during a portfolio review in Bratislava. These were photographs taken in the former Soviet Union. Many people photograph there. The post-Soviet reality is for young photographers....
Many Polish photographers after World War II until now have been trying to tackle one of the most difficult subjects of Polish reality - Silesia. How to present its synthetic vision, and above all the people and their problems, as well as the degraded environment and architecture? Such an attempt was also made by Jerzy Wierzbicki, who had already faced the subject of...
Waldemar Sliwczynski is known for his affection for photography, mainly through his self-published "Fotografia Quarterly". In fact, we met at the birth of the magazine, in the creation of which I decided to join, and this joint adventure continues to this day. Sliwczynski is a rare photography enthusiast who took the risk - including financial - of creating an ambitious magazine for connoisseurs....
Alexander Chekemynev, a photojournalist "of flesh and blood," has made a breakthrough into the canon of Ukrainian "high" photography. At the same time, it is worth noting that, as the author of several large, impressive photographic projects, he did not fall victim to the "disease of the 20th century," as design thinking in photography is sometimes referred to. Passport photosOne art student noted that for some time now artists have not been creating, a...