Tomasz Dobiszewski

What the Sun Has Not Seen
text by Alicja Panasiewicz

The shadow allows spatial vision, it provides information about the object and reveals its details, its form. The eponymous saying inspired a story about the metaphorical perception of the world through our star, a story in which the shapes of Georgian architecture were softened thanks to reduced shadows.

In his photographs, Tomasz Dobiszewski seeks objective features conditioning visible images. He explores the impalpability of photography, flatness of the picture determined by the direction of the Sun’s rays. In its flatness, photography negates carnality, which belongs to the sphere of touch. It reduces perception to visuality, which deprives the world of its physical properties: smell, texture and tactile sensations like temperature, smoothness and softness.

The photographs, cutting out spatial objects reduced to white spots on a black background, seem to be abstract pictures drawn by the hand of geometry. The flat surface of a photograph contradicts the essence of vision and prevents going beyond it. However, it opens the door of memory and imagination, recollection of smell, taste, form, light and shadow. It also makes us acknowledge the presence of time and its interception in photography. The direction of light rays, time of day, intensity of sunshine are the place and time captured when the shutter is pressed. The moment when the photographer and his/her camera face the stage — reality.