Wawalnica - Citroen Traction Avant

The small town of Wawalnica (Wąwałnica, 'von-vol-neets-a') in Eastern Poland is one of my favorite places. It is poor with a church growing rich on pilgrims coming to see its miraculous Madonna, it has a cemetery on the side of a hill that is lit at night by hundreds or thousands of candle lamps on the graves, a narrow gauge railway, great wooden cottages, picturesque countryside and interesting sandy gullies to be walked.

The Citroen Traction Avant is one of two I know in this region, and they were once used by government officials back in the 1950s. The wooden building behind it is the town hall.

This image is available for sale at Photo4me, framed and ready to hang!

Mall Meeting

This image is available for sale at Photo4me, framed and ready to hang!

Photographing people in natural settings is hard, and you often end up with an image much different to the one that you planned. That is not a problem if you are interested in art, but it could be if you are interested in skill. For art it is essential to find those ways to slip into the unexplored without a roadmap, while skill is about producing a predefined piece of work. Therefore, for art to end up with the unexpected is the ideal outcome, but in terms of craft skill then you have failed to produce the intended product.

The RAF Roundel 1

This image is available for sale at Photo4me, framed and ready to hang!

It seems such an alien process for people to use what is around them, the focus of society, education and business is 'a special tool or product for each individual purpose'. This image shows 2 plates and a bowl on a table, and while I could have drawn the lot from scratch it would have ignored one of the uses of a camera - to capture variations in light and shadows.

I am working on another version of this image, with a bigger roundel shape. I am hoping that someone will appreciate an RAF roundel type image that is not the standard type of image found with these things.