Many metaphors are used in relation to photography to convey the nature of its ambiguous and intriguing imagery. Some of them refer to its relation to time: photography as embalming time, photography as history, as a record of past time. Others refer to its pictorial relation to the world, to the places pictured, and embrace photography as a window or as a mirror....
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...
I am, I exist, I live. Three words, none of which brings us closer to the mystery of our existence. I and my body, the world and my reality in it. The eternal lessons of darkness*. The body is the visual evidence of our being, the bridge between the spiritual interior and the external material world. Uniquely, it happens to a person to establish a thread of communication with the individual - other - interior....
On January 21, 2022, the exhibition "Paper Landscapes," featuring photographs, installations and objects by Kamil Myszkowski, opened at the Sielecki Castle Art Center in Sosnowiec. The exhibition was on display until April 16, 2022. The starting point for the exhibition "Paper Landscapes" is a series of photographs I have been implementing successively since 2018, in which I refer to classical photography....
When photographing the places that inspire him, Maciej Kuszela also tries to emphasize the personal nature of this inspiration. Therefore, the final form of these images is usually the result of various additional manipulations, which may be surprising when juxtaposed with the fact that the term "photojournalist" appears so often in the author's biography. However, it is understandable that when a photograph is created out of a purely personal need, it...
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...
Looking at Igor Omulecki's work, one can get the impression that his photographs function above genre divisions, usually defining the internal dissimilarities of the medium of photography. Most often his name is associated with documentary, although this notion has been significantly blurred these days. Omulecki also not infrequently takes directed photographs, in which - unlike documents - the leading role is played by subtle...
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...
Come here, Youth, come! Behold, a new morning rises, A picture of truth hitherto unknown, Doubt and clouds of reason, Disputes for the crowd's delight - Behold, they have dispelled. Madness is a dark forest, It's a labyrinth of madly tangled roots. How many have fallen there! What they should care for, They do not know; In darkness for bones they stumble The dead in this wilderness. I...