Auto Fire is a six-image series concerned with memory, uncertainty and personal identity. The project began shortly before my thirtieth birthday, when I returned to places connected with my childhood and asked myself a seemingly simple question: where do I come from?
After fifteen years of absence, I revisited locations that had once felt familiar and emotionally significant. Although I associated them with no explicitly negative memories, returning produced an unexpected sense of unease. Places in which I had once belonged now appeared distant, and I encountered them from the position of a stranger.
Rather than reconstructing the past, I focused on selected objects and architectural fragments that had remained fixed in my memory. The photographs were made during long nocturnal exposures, using only available light. In post-production, secondary elements were carefully removed, isolating the remembered forms from their contemporary surroundings.
The resulting scenes exist outside a clearly defined place and time. Their apparent ordinariness shifts between nostalgia and anxiety, familiarity and estrangement. In this sense, Auto Fire is not an attempt to recover the past, but an impulse marking the beginning of a continuing investigation into memory, belonging and the construction of personal identity.
Selected works are available as limited-edition archival pigment prints (edition of 5 + 1 AP). For enquiries: info@tomekalbin.com
Exhibition Views
Auto Fire, Rondo Sztuki Gallery, Katowice, 2010
Auto Fire, DAP Gallery, Warsaw, 2011
