Poles Poles (2003)

A portrait of a portraitist.

For decades the photographer Krzysztof Gierłatowski has portrayed eminent Polish figures, thus creating an invaluable visual testimony. This time his "victims" are well-known citizens of Kraków: Stanisław Lem, one of the most brilliant, versatile, and unapologetically cerebral science fiction writers, author of 'Solaris'; Krzysztof Penderecki, one of the most esteemed and widely discussed Polish composers of the 20th century; and Wisława Szymborska, Nobel laureate in Literature in 1996, one of the few women poets who has received the Swedish prize. Gierłatowski assumes the role of a modern Stańczyk, a legendary thinker-jester, prophesying on the historical Polish Republic in his dramatic conviction that History annihilated the intellectual elite of his nation and the future will bring awe and destruction.