Goldenrod

Goldenrod tells the story of places where fields have ceased to be needed. As I photograph each site, I find myself asking the same question: Why does this plant grow here?

Goldenrod appears where cultivation ends. It grows across abandoned fields, fallow land, former farms, and places awaiting a new purpose. In the landscape of my home village and its surroundings, it has become one of the most visible traces of ongoing change.

I come from Trzcianka, a village in the Świętokrzyskie region of southeastern Poland. Over recent decades, agricultural land in the area has been gradually transformed by industry, investment, and shifting patterns of employment. Fewer people make their living from farming, some fields are left uncultivated, while others are sold for industrial development.

This project attempts to read the landscape through the presence of goldenrod. I photograph the places where it appears, asking a simple question: why is it growing here? Each image becomes a trace of an absence — a field, a farm, a way of life, or a relationship with the land that is slowly disappearing.

Industrial transformation is not new to this region. During the 1960s and 1990s, entire villages were displaced to make way for sulfur mining operations. Today, however, these changes feel more personal. I see them unfolding around me because, along with them, the landscape of my childhood is disappearing.