The exhibition site –
Toruń Zoobotanical Garden
Vernissage – 1 December 2023 at 12pm
The Białowieża Forest is several thousand years old. Woody vegetation appeared there after the glacier receded. There are places there where it feels like time has stopped. Several hundred year old oaks, lime trees, majestic pines, sky-high spruce trees. The whole is complemented by mossy, once mighty giant trees piled on the ground, slowly decaying and providing nourishment for the next generation of trees. Herbivores, first and foremost European bisons, carnivores, organisms that feed on dead matter, invertebrates, fungi and mysterious mycetozoa… All intertwined by an invisible thread of life.
I was fortunate to be born and raised in the Białowieża Forest. This is also where I began my adventure with photography. When, as a student of a forestry technical school, I composed my first frames through the viewfinder of the iconic Zenith, I was aware that I was capturing something permanent and unchangeable. However, this was not the case. Some of these places look different; sometimes the metamorphoses are downright revolutionary. The nature around us is not permanent; it is a continuous chain of transformations since the origin of life. It is quite similar with the Forest. Time can only be stopped in a frame…
The photos presented in the exhibition were taken between 1990 and 2022 and are also a kind of record of the development of photographic technology and the evolution of the photographer’s way of looking at nature.
