Photo Day One

This morning it snowed. I knew this from the whiteness of the light diffusing through the thin curtains of my bedroom window. This was Sopot, a small seaside resort near Gdansk. After five hours of painfully slow progress on traffic-bound roads I turned towards the Hel peninsular.

Here I arrived at the Puck Lagoon, a bay of ice with waves frozen in mid-flow, horizoned by slate coloured skies. A pinhole camera, in such conditions, requires long exposures, in this case they were as long as naked hands could bear. Eyeballs hurt and the wind penetrated the crevices of clothing advertised as windproof.

The shock and awe of this scene helped overcome these difficulties, with the rental car my moveable sanctuary. How was it, I thought, as I ended the day at port of the peninsular’s tip, that seagulls could bath in the liquid pools in this freezing sea, seemingly immune. Needs must.

Photo Day Two

Starting off from Jurata I thought of the pitiful German soldiers hiding from the Red Army on this peninsular. It was the last area to surrender in 1945. While photographing the ice lagoon I was amused to be joined by a family walking their dog - on the ice.

That evening we arrived at Leba on the edge of the Slowinski National Park. Unaware of borders and boundaries we drove to the port determined to glimpse a rose sunset. Blind to our position we inadvertently drove into a military zone. The port authorities conveyed to us the seriousness of our misdemeanor. Pictures bagged and language our aid we were allowed to continue our journey.

Photo Day Three

Lake Gardno in the Słowinskie Lakeland is lake caked within ice, but with warmth and colour, so different from the Hel lagoon. The skies were suffused with a soft glow from a sun unable to penetrate the blanket of white clouds. I was comforted by an abandoned white house; a sheltered place from where the wind broke the silence of the ice.