Encounters with Photography in Michalowice – Wojciech Zawadzki
2011-04-15
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On Friday, the 15th of April, in Michalowice, another Encounter with Photography took place - this time Athanor Group was honoured to host a well-known photographer Wojciech Zawadzki. Zawadzki is faithful to classical technique – he takes photographs with a large format camera. The images he collects with the lens he usually exhibits in series – in Michalowice we could admire two of them: “My America” and “The Stone Spot”. Photographs entitled “My America”, collected since 1997, show Walbrzych and Jelenia Gora – two precious to the author cities – in the very characteristic to Zawadzki way. The light and shadow, intertwined together, let us see bits and pieces of streets, forgotten corners or suburban nooks, where one does not usually walk on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Well, a spectator can see a peculiar image of a city which, often captured just before its total devastation, evokes a thought about transience of the material activity of a man. “The Stone Spot” is a series of photographs from the hills and forests of Karkonosze Mountains. Stones, small and giant, hidden in the bushes and bare lying in the middle of nowhere - are they the Moonstones? Or, perhaps, they are gems, which put on gray crust wishing to be left in peace forever. Some of them seem to contemplate the tranquillity of their spots still remembering the other surrounding they had witnessed just before the anger of Nature threw them far away. And maybe, because quite some time has passed since the pictures were taken, a few of them could be no longer found at the same spots as in the photographs. Where are they then? They could be lying as the cornerstones in the foundations of a house...Well, these photographs sure inspire to spin stories. And looking at the images we were certain that at the time when Zawadzki's lens captured this or that stone, they were left in silent thinking, on the spots which time prepared just for them. Likewise, that evening in Michalowice, we felt that everything was happening in the right place at the right time...stones present in different ways in every image; beams of light dancing on the walls and looking for their reflections in bits of a window glass or tile of a mountain pond; shivering shadows; thoughts and gestures of the gathered guests...no wonder that we were talking about photography until late hours. Wojciech Zawadzki (born in 1950) creatively
involved in photography since the 70s.
Wojciech Zawadzki's photograph can be found in many collections: National Museum in Warsaw, Museum of Art in Lodz, Wroclaw National Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art in Hünfleld (Germany), Silesian Contemporary Art Collection and in many private collections. |
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