t o u r d e p o l o g n e

Upper Silesia, Poland

Tourdepologne is not really a series telling certain truth or story, but just few images from the streets of Upper Silesia cities. Well, this is one huge city, which grown from several smaller administrative organisms. Upper Silesia is the most industrial part of Poland, which position grown up with coal and goes down with every mine closed. Inside this powerful agglomeration you can find islands of forgotten people, ex-miners and their families, unemployed sometimes for second generation. They live in XIX centuries houses called here familoki, but you can translate it into favelas.

Here on the streets and yards I met children, real silesian children. Their parents forget to send them to school, force them to collect scrap-metal for buying beer or cigarettes. Do you really find all of this, what I just wrote, in my pictures?

I do not have any sophisticated ideology about making pictures, I do not want to create unexisting worlds, I am just showing thru photography what I have seen ? real people in real world, walking always with camera in my hand.

I was living there, on one of those islands for few years; the pictures are made on my way from job, my walks to throw away rubish to the heap, during spare time walks around the house. Majority of those children were my neighbours and friends. I want to show you pieces of their world, the way I have seen them, on my point of view.