Birds (2002-2022)

The "Birds" project 2002-2022. I started this project in 2002 with two photos of birds flying high in the sky. They were taken on the out-of-date Kodak T-max 3200, forced to a sensitivity of 25,000 to increase the contrast. The recorded on the negative images of birds had the size of a pinhead. Even the first prints were clearly grainy, the vertically positioned enlarger allowed me to reproduce the silhouettes up to a size of only a dozen centimeters. After the prints had dried, I repeated the negative-positive process. I copied the enlarged images from the paper prints onto the frames of the negative. Then I mounted the enlarger horizontally and from ca. 5 meters away I was able to get large, very grainy bird silhouettes. I copied each negative twice on six sheets of Kodak Polymax II RC paper in the 20.3 cm x 25.4 cm format, joined together into large rectangles of 76 cm x 40 cm. I trimmed four sheets on the right side to improve the composition. I mixed up the elements of the four sets made up from two double images of birds. This is how four collages were created, two in the format of 76 cm x 40 cm and two in the format of 63 cm x 40 cm, which I stuck one by one onto a black canvas. In 2002, I was 17 years old. Then I wrote a few sentences of reflection on the resulting project: "these photographs may remind of free, unrestrained perception [...]. reality offers many possibilities, but the world is chaos, we can only organize what surrounds us most closely, but an attempt to explain and organize the world is a utopia, doomed to failure [...]. maybe sometimes we get too used to certain states or perceptions. I believe that we need movement, not so much a new, but a fresh experience of reality. we will never fully explore anything, [...] there will always be a dimension that we have not known yet, [...] the ways of perceiving reality are endless, [...] the world is beyond comprehension". In 2002, I placed the collages on the canvas in various places of public space in Wrocław. Then I photographed them in a new context. Exactly 20 years later, in 2022, I presented this project in a new, refreshed form during an exhibition at the Wrocław Contemporary Museum.