Phantoms (wip)

If you sometimes happened to visit the North Sea coast, you probably have seen strange concrete constructions scattered along the coastline. Some roll in deep dunes, others lie at their bottom straightly on a beach, and some of them are literally rolling ashore, washed by sea waves, half hidden in sand, broken and even lying upside down. When you look at them it creates a feeling as if someone's huge hand dumped them from a pedestal of dunes, having plunged them into sea abysses and having provided them to forces of nature to finish with remains of once terrible enemy. Those are bunkers of the well-known Atlantic Wall – pride, ambitions and unfulfilled hopes of the great genius Adolf Hitler. Today they hold their last defense in fight with nature and the municipal services, that trying to erase the last reminders of defeats and losses from memory and from the earth’s face. Not less interesting and rare phenomena in these areas are the remains of ships, damaged in battles and beached during military operations. They are real phantoms! It’s not possible to see them always. Only in recent years the carcasses of some of them came out of the sand and when the tide begins, you can walk to them on the seabed. But once maritime waters start rising again, waves hide them slowly under their blanket and salt slurry. In a couple of hours wracks are completely invisible. Once I had an idea to capture the phantom of these objects. To enhance the effect of unreality, I chose to photograph in the night, when the darkness hides everything visible to human eye. To take the phantoms out of darkness, I use additional lighting. Looking at the pictures gives the impression that these objects are clearly visible at night, but it is only an illusion. Photographing them, I stayed in total blackness, snatching them out of darkness just for a while with a help of a light beam. They were never visible completely, as seen in the photos. While working, I saw only small fragments, which I was highlighting. It was almost blind work. The rest had been done by camera. It captured bunkers and ships as organic whole, drifting in the night and in time.