The Photographs Have Been Taken in Szopienice

I'm going, I walking to look... I meet faces. They say to me. Everyone has a face, everyone has a story. Do you want to steal our faces? - The elderly couple jokingly asked me. Maybe that's what I'm doing - stealing faces?

Szopienice is a Katowice district, the city on the upper Silesia, in Poland. To 1960 it was independent. Szopienice was founded as a village in 1360 and it was developed in the second half of the nineteenth century around the metallurgy industry. The civic rightist was given to it in 1951.
Upper Silesia to the thirteenth century, was part of the Polish. From the XIV it was in the Czech Crown. In 1742, it moved for the most part to the Prussia. Since 1870, together with Prussia have been it in the German Reich. In 1922, the south-eastern part of Upper Silesia with Szopienice was incorporated to the Polish. 1945 - Upper Silesia is in Polish and Czechoslovak borders.

I photographed Szopienice in the spring of 2003. Suggested me to do an exhibition in the local community center. As its subject I chose the people from the streets of the district of Katowice. I was rather well received. No one was aggressive towards me, but not always my job was accepted. The first pictures I did in March 2003, finished in May. The exhibition took place in June.

Dettagli