Good, Better...

From Dobroszyce’s 'good life' to a statistical paradise (91% satisfaction). On the Island, I’m a foreign body. I study happiness between my daughter’s birth and a senior’s passing. Taming a place where life is no longer good—it’s better.

For 34 years, my life was inextricably linked with the Dobroszyce municipality. Over the past dozen or so years, I photographed daily life there, documenting the slow but inevitable changes occurring in the Polish countryside. My work was an intimate dialogue with a place whose official motto was "Dobroszyce - a good life." I believed in this slogan, becoming a chronicler of this local micro-reality.

However, after 2021, as a result of the pandemic and professional turbulence, my "good life" underwent a violent transformation. I found myself on Wrocław's "Great Island" (Wielka Wyspa) a place regarded in sociological rankings as a statistical ideal. According to a 2022 report by Otodom and ThinkCo, as many as 89% of residents declare full satisfaction here, and 91% rate Wrocław as the best place to live.

I moved from a place that promised a "good" life to a place proclaimed "the best." Nevertheless, in this statistical paradise, I feel like a foreign body.

My project is a visual study of adaptation and the feeling of alienation. As a photographer shaped by open rural spaces, I am trying to find my way in a new urban ecosystem which, though green and prestigious, remains unfamiliar to me. My sense of estrangement is deepened by a radical change in life roles: I finally found full-time employment, spent several years caring for an elderly woman, and became a father to a daughter.

In this series of photographs, I seek answers to questions about the nature of contemporary happiness:

• Can the "good life" from Dobroszyce be transplanted into the framework of a modern metropolis?

• What are the limits of human adaptation in a place that theoretically offers everything?

• How can the language of photography help tame the fear of the new, when daily life is suspended between the beginning of life and its twilight?

I believe my presence here is not a mistake, but a process. My photographs are proof that the old "good life" is gone forever. Now, it is different—harder, denser, filled with new responsibilities. It is no longer good. It is better, even if this "betterness" requires me to redefine everything I have known about the world and myself until now.