Exhibition of Photographs by Henryk Hetflaisz

MAGIC OF NATURE IS SUBJECT OF EXHIBITION BY YOUNG POLISH PHOTOGRAPHER IN LONDON


Henryk Hetflaisz's "Fragments" and "Shadow Figures" series which go on show at Gallery 27 from February 27 is the young Polish photographer's first London Exhibition. The exhibition comprises some 40 photographs taken around the world over the past four years.

Henryk Hetflaisz's work hangs in many private collections and has been published in numerous publications, including The Tatler, Modern Painters, Independent on Sunday.

Great photographers are able to share, not only what they have seen, but what they have become – observers transcending the known to reveal the unknown. Henryk Hetflaisz speaks reverentially of the “things that draw me in.” “The pull is so powerful,” he says, but he doesn’t fully comprehend it. Why must he photograph that tree clinging to the rocks, a picture he titles “The Ghost of Espiritu Santo” Why photograph the spider web on his morning walk, the eye of the elephant? I believe he understands that by becoming one with what he sees – for a moment, a day or “cycles of years” – he can best fulfill his intellectual and spiritual quests. “No ideas but in things,” wrote the poet William Carlos Williams. But ideas emanating from concrete objects soon become the intangibles of life.
Hetflaisz has a deep sense of nature, the magic of the earth and man’s place in it. Raised in a small village in communist Poland where beauty and art were not celebrated or even noticed, he ventured into the natural world around his parents’ farm. This love of the natural world led him to read environmental sciences at Warsaw University. Later, he recognized his true calling to be photography. “Spiritual ecology” was the term the great Austrian-born colour photographer Ernst Haas called his (and by extension Hetflaisz’s) type of photography.

This, Hetflaisz's first exhibition, is divided in two parts. The "Fragments" series comprises photographs taken around the world over the past four years. The subjects include Masai settlements perched on a cliff's edge in Tanzania; still water in the pool of a fountain in Antigua, Guatemala; the space within a progressing glacier in Patagonia, Argentina. Yet each picture is indefinable, timeless, impossible to categorize, symbolic. The glacier becomes a womb or a wave; the Masai settlements appear to be intricate lace-work, or perhaps seed pods. Each picture challenges the viewer to make up his or her own story about what they are seeing and, like origin myths, where it came from.

It is not surprising that his work has appeared in the magazine Psychologies. For whether in his “Fragments” series or in his “Shadow Figures,” the unconscious mind can be seen as the source of night dreams, memories and the locus of implicit knowledge.
Nowhere is Hetflaisz's sense of poetry more present than in his “Shadow Figures” series which often leaves the viewer confounded, not from confusion, but in reverence of the beauty of the work and his mastery of the photographic process. This series places a universal being, an "everyman" into a variety of timeless, Arcadian and dream-like settings. In reality these settings range from a ryokan in Kyoto, an eyrie on the banks of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala and a gazebo in Henryk's garden in Kent. Yet, to the viewer they represent landscapes as universal as the central figures within them.


Like the poet Wordsworth who gave voice to the "everyman," Hetflaisz's gift is that he can recognize the beauty and worth that come from our dream-like states and present them without judgment. To quote the mythologist Joseph Campbell, Henryk’s photographs are "a dialogue of unconscious forms put forth by the unconscious mind and recognised by the conscious in continuous interaction."

Henryk believes that labels limit one's experience and blind us to life's essential truths. For him, photography is not about capturing a scene or a person, but about setting-free the imagination on a never-ending enquiry into the mystery of our universe.