It was 3 a.m., and it was snowing that morning in Zwolen, in central Slovakia. We boarded a bus and set off on a 5-hour journey to the first Polish city abroad to catch the weekend market. I was about 10 years old, I vividly remember the cozy feeling in my feet in the leather boots my parents had recently bought me at the very same place. I was wearing an oversized winter jacket with the name of a famous field hockey team misspelled on the back, which had also been bought probably two years earlier, also at the same market.
I returned to Poland 20 years later to meet her and stay. Since then, I’ve tried to orient myself to my new surroundings, using photography to record my thoughts. And I still failed to capture the essence of what all this newness meant to me.
These photos were not meant to be a definite portrait of Poland. They were random at first, until I noticed that they did, however, represent exactly what Poland is to me.
Gallery
