The smell of coal dust and smoke still linger in my memory. The air in Silesia always carried a certain weight—thick with the remnants of industry, with stories left unspoken. As a child, I walked these streets without a second thought. As a photographer, I returned to them with a different gaze, trying to decipher what time had taken and what it had left behind.
Between 2002 and 2012, I moved through Silesia with a camera in hand, searching. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for—only that I felt something slipping through my fingers. The world I had known was changing. The factories, once the heart of this land, were falling silent. People moved through the streets with a quiet determination, caught between what was and what would come next. Black and white film felt like the only way to capture it—shadows stretching long across cracked sidewalks, light filtering through smudged windows, faces etched with the kind of resilience that only exists in places where survival is a way of life.
Photography, in those years, was discovery. I was learning not just how to take pictures, but how to see. Every frame became a way of holding onto something I feared would disappear: the shapes of people waiting at a bus stop, the geometry of weathered apartment blocks, the way children played in courtyards as if time had no say in their joy. I didn’t realize it then, but I was documenting a farewell—capturing echoes of a place that would never exist in quite the same way again.
Then, I left. Life carried me elsewhere. And for a long time, Silesia became a place I spoke of in the past tense.
I walked the same streets again during my short visits to the home country, but the distance of years made them feel unfamiliar. Some things had changed—new facades, new businesses, a fresh coat of paint covering old histories. And yet, some things remained: the way the light bent around the buildings at dusk, the hushed reverence inside my childhood church, the unmistakable pull of memory in places I hadn’t photographed in years. This time, I photographed in color. Not because the past had faded, but because I needed to see it fully—to embrace what had changed, to acknowledge what had endured.
These images are more than documentation. They are an act of reconciliation. A dialogue between the person I was when I first pressed the shutter and the person I am now. A conversation between the Silesia I left behind and the Silesia that still lives in me.
Before & After is a love letter still being written to a place that shaped me, a meditation on time, loss, and belonging. It is an invitation—to step into my memories, to walk these places with me, to feel the weight of history in every brick and the warmth of nostalgia in every fading light.
This is my Silesia. And through these images, for a moment, it can be yours too.
