Meet the winner of the 11th Portfolio Review!
The jury awarded Wiktor for creating a concise narrative while still leaving space for the viewer to ask. CONGRATULATIONS!
Wiktor Dąbkowski (1972, Płock) is a photojournalist whose work has been published in The Financial Times, Spiegel, Focus, WiWo, Le Point, Huffington Post, De La Croix, Le Soir, Polityka, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, Newsweek, TIME and many others. Graduated from political science, economic and sociological studies after 15 years long career as a radio host, he changed his life in 2006 and he started to tell the stories using photography. Since this time he shares time between editorial work and personal projects. In 2014 together with friends, Polish artists he established People You May Know collective. His works have been presented at the Noorderlicht festival and Format Festival, won first prize at the ESPY biennale and have been projected at the National Portrait Gallery. He also participated in the Sputnik Photos photography collective mentorship programme, mentored by Rafał Milach. In 2015 Wiktor became one of the ShowOFF Section's laureate.
In bush therapy
Hidden in the woods there are sources of healthy waters. There are also healthcare resorts which should gather people for whom such waters are a cure. However they attract not only patients, but also those for whom water is only a pretext for escaping family lives and plunging into night life. For them a stay in a healthcare resort becomes an opportunity to dance and flirt. It is a sort of inheritance after communist times when a stay in a healthcare resort was treated as free holidays. This way of thinking, despite a lapse of time, has its consequences even today: stories of time spent in such resorts can still be heard today, some of them have evolved into myths already. I decided to check how much truth lays in those stories, and to what extent they are fabricated. The series of photographs was made in Polish healthcare resorts and tries to find a balance between legends and nightlife reality.
