On the mainland, there's a constant growling, rumbling, squawking, squeaking, whistling, knocking, tapping, rattling, chirping, wailing, hissing, bleating, or hooting. But on Spitsbergen, everything falls silent as a red-hot coal dropped into deep snow. If the wind isn't blowing, very few things make a sound there. Sometimes a glacier will creak, occasionally snow will collapse somewhere deep, but otherwise, in the middle of a short, moss-like October day, it's completely quiet, hushed. The landscape reflects itself in a person's soul, like wrinkles straight onto their very being, without any shimmering accompaniments, until the cold starts to bite at the bones.
On a narrative level, „Cichobiel” is a story about the inaccessibility and inhospitable nature of the primal landscapes of Spitsbergen, captured during what else but fatal weather – fog, rain, snow, or gusting winds. It is also a study of silence, stillness, and photography itself. There's a fundamental difference between what is remembered and an image on a monitor, and then a finished photograph, which once again belongs to the physical world. I feel I've borrowed the raw Arctic light, which I've been trying to render on paper for many months, but so far I haven't managed to achieve the whiteness I saw there. This beautiful sense of incompletion has materialised in the form of an exhibition.
Maciej Żynda(1984) – computer scientist, philosopher, and photographer. In 2010, he graduated from the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science at the University of Gdańsk, specialising in Algorithms and Data Structures, and in 2009 from the Faculty of Social Sciences with a specialisation in Aesthetics at the same university. A member of the Association of Polish Nature Photographers (ZPFP) and the International Association of Art Photographers (IAAP). The author has won numerous awards and distinctions in international photography competitions.
