The exhibition includes portraits of people hardened by the harshness and unpredictability of the sea; the intermingling of successive generations living from the graciousness of the waters of the Vistula Lagoon; elusive landscapes, visible only to those who manage to delve into a world that is close, but almost completely hermetic for an ‘outsider’. A unique photographic document by Grzegorz Klatka, presented last year at the Museum of the Vistula Lagoon, can be seen at the Fisheries Museum in Hel from October 2022 to April 2023.

Photographer and reporter Grzegorz Klatka, a graduate of the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava in the Czech Republic, is the author of photo essays published, among others, in the weekly magazines Polityka, Gość Niedzielny, Newsweek, Viva, Sontag Zeitung (Switzerland), Reflex (Czech Republic), Courier Internationale (France), Elsevier (Netherlands), in the monthly magazines Zwierciadło and Forbes and in the quarterly Fotografia.

He is the winner of the first, second and third prize in the Polish Press Photography Contest (1998, 1999), second prize in the Humanity Photo Awards (Beijing, China 2007), and winner of the Grand Prix in the Plock Poster Biennale (2007).

The photographic material documenting the lives of fishermen on the Vistula Lagoon was created at the turn of 2020 and 2021.

Each protagonist captured in the photographs has a separate story. Watching Grzegorz Klatka’s pictures, we get to know people whose lives require stubbornness and steadfastness on the one hand, and the ability to adapt to the volatility of not only the wind and the waves, but also the vicissitudes of fate, on the other. The heroes of the documentary and their stories are presented in 47 photographs. The exhibition is accompanied by a photo album, Fishermen of the Vistula Lagoon, presenting a full selection of photographs taken by Grzegorz Klatka during the project. The publication is available in the NMM online shop: https://nmm.pl/produkt/rybacy-zalewu-wislanego/.

Adrian Andrzejewski