Japanese Locations

Wojtek Skowron

The themes of my photography are the emotions trapped in the things people create and in the places they leave their mark. The people themselves usually aren’t visible – their presence would be too loud, their gloss too glaring. I seek my motifs in things that are ignored, neglected, pushed to the fringe. I find them in places and things that are temporarily orphaned, that are liberated from human presence, that seem to make themselves independent. Regardless of their pre-determined function, they allow themselves the freedom of exuberance, of dramatic gestures, melancholy, longing, naïve amiability, sadness, silly grimaces and heroic poses. This exhibition, which shows the photographic results of my trips to Japan in 2015 and 2016, is also conceived as an emotional portrait of Japanese locations far from any predictable exoticism or current Japan clichés. Wojtek Skowron