The Polish version of this album appeared on the market in 2006 and became one of the most popular albums published in Pomorze and Poland in the last six years. To date, seven volumes of this album have appeared.
The authors of the photographs are Zbigniew and Maciej Kosycarz, father and son, photographic journalists and chroniclers. Just after the end of the Second World War in 1945, Zbigniew Kosycarz came to Gdańsk. The first photograph in the album is of an advertising pillar still with German posters on it but onto which the first Polish posters have also been stuck. The devastated city and the awakening life - these and others from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s were taken by Zbigniew Kosycarz, the indefatigable chronicler of Gdańsk and the region. At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, we often have similar situations and places but this time seen through the lens and the eyes of Maciej Kosycarz.
The three hundred and twenty images selected from over a million photographs taken by Zbigniew and Maciej Kosycarz and published on a hundred and sixty pages in this album show over sixty years of the history of Poland and Europe connected with Gdańsk, Gdynia, Sopot and the Pomorze region. The photographs show not only great and well-known events but also and mainly the everyday lives of people, their clothes, play and work. In them you can see situations that are very similar to those in well-known images by photographers in Paris, New York or Budapest. It turns out that, at those very same times, life was also going on in Gdańsk, Gdynia, Sopot and Pomorze. And it is precisely this life, just like in those other cities, that has been captured in the photographs of Zbigniew and Maciej Kosycarz.
The decision to publish the first album in 2006 was undoubtedly affected by the success of the exhibition entitled “Gdańsk – an ordinary city through the lens of father and son”. It was shown not only in Gdańsk but also in Budapest, Mostar, Belgrade, Holbaek in Denmark, Kaliningrad and Kalmar and evoked very warm and kind responses from all those who saw the photographs at the exhibition. Some of the photographs from this exhibition were later published in the album.
Thanks to the photographs and their descriptions, the album has brought to life in an interesting way the history and life of the last decades in Poland, using the example of Gdańsk, Sopot and Gdynia. Many people, despite geographical and political differences, will surely find similarities to the situations in their own home countries.