NON-SEASONAL CHANGES

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Photos of the town of Niepołomice and its inhabitants have been made since the summer of 2006. Dynamic changes which the town and the region have been undergoing since the beginning of transformations including the sheer scale of investments, an influx of people, growing public trust and political stability have all contributed to making this place different from the rest of the country. Transformations seem to have been progressing smoothly there and the town itself has become a model of successful political and economic changes and the development of a local community.

These changes have been documented by several dozen photos taken by photographers related to the Imago Mundi Foundation and the Visavis.pl Photographers' Collective: Andrzeja Kramarz, Bogdan Krężel, Przemyslaw Krzakiewicz, Bartek Solik, Tomasz Padlo i Lukasz Trzcinski. Photos showing huge investments which have provided workplaces for the local population and drawn people from the nearby Krakow are intertwined with those of ordinary events which only become significant in microscale. The question is what will have a more lasting effect. A ball for the disabled which may give some a taste of "real life" or a new plant which may help to overcome an economic crisis one day? Photos need not answer any of these questions, it is enough that they provoke them. Which they did. The outcome is quantitative research which was conducted in the spring of 2008 by a group of sociology students from the Institute of Sociology of the Jagiellonian University under the supervision of professor Krystynę Slany and Agata Młodawska, MA. The researchers were interested in the condition of the the Niepołomice civic society, the level of public trust and the quality of religious life.

The researchers are trying to break down the changes captured by the photos into elements, find out about mechanisms which govern them and discover dependencies between them. Maybe these attempts can teach us something new about a society undergoing immense changes or understand what has already been shown.

text by: Anna Mateja

Firewomen. There are a dozen of them. The weaker sex? Absolutely not! Would they serve in the voluntary fire brigade if they were weak?! Just as their male colleagues from the unit in Zabierzow Bochenski, they go to fires, floods and accidents. Some have licenses allowing them to drive the fire engines. And they lose nothing of their female charm in the process. When they smile, live becomes easier. No wonder that the well-known Polish saying about the erotic attraction of the male military uniform is used here in a sex-inverted version. ©Lukasz Trzcinski

650 people will be employed till 2010 in the MAN trucks factory in Niepolomice, which was built from ground up in a few months time and with the cost of 100 million euro. The employees of the company, only working on one shift, are able to assemble 15 thousand cars per year. The factory is in fact assembly plant, that produces trucks TGA WorldWide (total mass up to 16 tonnes) which will be sold on Central and East European and Russian market. ©Bogdan Krezel