In ‘The Capital’, the photographs are not meant to illustrate Jaworski’s poems, as is often the case in other publications of this kind, rather, the pictures constitute an autonomous symbolic layer which interacts with the text in complex ways. The whole thing is a carefully composed and original poetic construct. Like Jaworski’s photographic poems, which are not about Silesia only, Wilczyk’s poetic photographs exceed the borders of the region, and pertain to general ‘post-industrial’ condition that nowadays defines not only Silesia and not only Poland. In turn, what looms large in ‘Black and White Silesia’ is a personal narrative of disintegration towns, quarters, city districts, streets and their residents are subject to. In a way, the black and white record of the decomposition results from Wilczyk’s nostalgia for the great industrial past; nostalgia which in the dark pictures of decomposing reality turns imperceptibly into a melancholic feeling of loss of the entity that integrates modernity. Wilczyk’s analytical photos are well-suited to what … Jean Beaudrillard termed ‘cold ecstasy’. The project, carried out systematically and carefully, of portraying the disintegration of the whole region leads to technically and formally perfect works. Industrial buildings deteriorate under cold look of a camera. In his own essay in ‘Black and White Silesia’, Wilczyk mentions a group of foreigners who compared what they had seen to pictures and climate of ancient ruins and there indeed seems to be some similarity in the melancholy of epochs that are in the past now.
By Adam Mazur, fotoTAPETA 2004
In his black and white pictures, Wilczyk captures some amazing state of being half-way between a building and a ruin, like Piranesi wandering around Rome but without Piranesi’s fabrications. If one were to look for tradition in which to put the photographs, then it would have to be the tradition of Polish Left — in the 1930s, Bronisław Wojciech Linke went to Silesia to portray the murderous industrial leviathan. However, as regards the model of documenting architecture impersonally and objectively, then works of the familiar Düsseldorf school of photography come to mind, that is, those by Bernd and Hilla Becher and their followers, for example, Thomas Strut who visited Eastern Germany in the early 1990s in order to take photographs of cities there. Wilczyk approaches this tradition, as it is the only solution here — sentimental reduction works very well with pictures of dying industrial.
By Dorota Jarecka, Gazeta Wyborcza, 2004