Black

One day there comes the darkness. It takes the shape of figures, pictures and objects. It absorbs light, brings confusion and anxiety. It is hard to name it and even harder to see. Darkness is emerging from the inside and overflowing into reality. Sometimes it is an explosion and sometimes only a shadow line, a feeling, melancholy. An explosion of fear and anger, a feeling of loss, melancholy, that remains after what’s gone. It lies within small things, in simple everyday activities. In figures of the imagination and in dreams: in waking dreams and in those, to which we have no access. We slowly tame it, learn to live with it, patiently waiting for it to tame us.

Infraordinaire

Infraordinaire focuses on what usually remains outside the field of vision—not because it is hidden, but because it is too obvious. The point of departure is everyday life understood not as a subject, but as a structure of experience: repetitive, seemingly banal, deprived of eventfulness. What interests me is not what is exceptional, but what persists in the background; not what is spectacular, but what is insistently present. The images depict fragments of reality stripped of narrative context: objects that have lost their unequivocal function. These objects are not protagonists in themselves; they operate as carriers of relations between the human subject and the space in which one attempts to dwell temporarily. The photographs do not document events, but register infra-ordinary situations: minor displacements, micro-rhythms, traces of use, signs of accumulated presence. The absence of the human figure is visible, yet it is a paradoxical absence—strongly felt through what has been left behind. Each image bears traces of a gesture: placing, covering, securing, identifying.

These are minimal gestures, often improvised, devoid of aesthetic intention, yet saturated with existential significance. The image does not serve an informational or illustrative function. It does not explain the situation. Rather, it functions as a tool of attentive suspension to articulate what usually eludes description because it appears too obvious to require language. Photography operates here as a medium of deceleration, drawing out the materiality and temporality of things that, in everyday experience, remain transparent. The project proposes a conscious shift of perspective: from exotica to endotica, from narratives about “others” to a reflection on one’s own experience of being in the world. Urban space and everyday objects are not treated as a backdrop for dramatic stories, but as active participants in relations through which the fragility of human strategies of protection, survival, and identification becomes apparent. Photography thus becomes a form of personal anthropology—not in an autobiographical sense, but a cognitive one—as a method of examining what is shared, repetitive, and rendered invisible by excess of presence.

Infraordinaire N.2. PhD series (2024)

Purposeful play of meanings, emerging between the image, which is given, and the awareness that reality is not behind it, but at most its fragmented pieces, is the fundamental intention of the cycle. It is in the play, or in the movement, that a sequence of meanings is born, transitioning from the sense of the scene’s reality to the complete negation of that reality. Despite being entirely manipulated, these photographs, since they are constructed from real registrations, can reflect one of the possible versions of reality. They are, in a sense, suspended in the space of potentiality and combinatorics.

Palermo (2024–2025)

A landscape of destruction is, after all, a landscape. Ruins can be beautiful. Seeing beauty in photos of the ruins of the World Trade Center in the months immediately after the attack had a hint of indecency, sacrilege. Most people dared only to say that the photos were ‘surreal.’ A wild euphemism, behind which lurked the dethroned notion of beauty. –Susan Sontag

Polish–Italian photographer and visual researcher based in Kraków.

He earned his PhD in Photography from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and a degree in Liberal Arts from the Jagiellonian University, where he previously taught literary theory. His artistic practice is shaped by a long-term engagement with photographic theory, literature, and the history of images. He has been a member of the Association of Polish Art Photographers (ZPAF) for over two decades. In 2013 his work was presented at Paris Photo by Galerie Conrads (Düsseldorf).

Alongside his artistic practice, he is a professor of photography at the Kraków University of Technology and teaches at the AMA Film Academy Pilichowski-Ragno’s work explores the ontological status of the photographic image at the intersection of memory, everyday experience, and cultural residue. His projects often focus on the infra-ordinary: banal spaces, marginal situations, and apparently neutral fragments of reality that reveal latent tensions through sustained observation.

Drawing on conceptual photography, phenomenology, and literary narrative strategies, he constructs sequences rather than discrete images, emphasizing duration, repetition, and subtle shifts in perception. In this context, the photograph functions less as a document and more as a reflective surface—an object mediating between lived experience and its symbolic afterimage.