Here are a few words about the author written by art historian Barbara Haręża:
To make time stand still, to stop the breath, to make stillness prevail over movement and silence over clamour, to bring the gears driven by a perpetuum mobile to a halt. This is a great skill known only to a few: how to enclose the transience of a moment, its fragility and ephemerality, within a single frame, while also giving it a visual setting and form.
Mirosław Machalski is one of those few who, through the medium of photography, create exceptional images of fleeting reality. Travelling through countless places, often extremely impoverished cities and districts, the artist records the surrounding reality on light-sensitive material. It is precisely the everyday life of the street, its merely apparent lack of appeal, that he has made the subject of his searches and artistic inquiries. And although the place in the photographs is important, serving as the backdrop of the narrative and creating its mood, ultimately it is the human being who stands at the centre of attention, captured in everyday ritual activities and absorbed in the prosaic nature of life. Their fragility, old age and weakness, but also their dignity, straightforwardness and steadfastness, determine the expressive power of the image; they are both its cause and its effect. At the same time, this vision radiates a certain optimism and joy of life, and above all, faith in humanity.
All this means that Mirosław Machalski’s photographic work eludes the confines of street photography. It is not a brilliant observation of reality, but a poetic view of it, through which the artist joins the tradition of documentary humanist photography represented by such outstanding photographers as Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks and Tadeusz Rolke. These small, seemingly insignificant moments, fleetingly captured in the frame, contain a question about the entire human condition. Mirosław Machalski, revealing exceptional sensitivity through his lens, empathy towards the people he photographs and a rare ability to draw beauty from everyday life, enters precisely this discourse.
In his photographs, penetrating observation of the surroundings is always accompanied by attention to composition and visual expression. We encounter achromatic, harmonious close-ups in which the human figure is the dominant element. Yet they are far from the meticulously refined, detail-perfect images that construct reality and are now produced on a mass scale. Instead, we receive an authentic message composed of a sequence of deliberately imperfect shots, possessing the stylistic coherence of a unified series. These works should be viewed as a whole. Together, through their distinctive form, they create an honest commentary on the reality being photographed.
Looking at passers-by captured in the frame as they go about their lives, vendors focused on their work, monks caught dozing off and elderly people chatting, as well as homeless people reconciled to their fate, we experience the peculiar conviction that their fate becomes part of our own. We succumb to the impression of a fleeting moment that grows into the dimension of an eternal moment. We simply hold our breath.