SILESIA (Poland, 1978-1979)
The 1970s were the apogee for mining and the steel industry in Poland. Micha¸ Ca¸a became fascinated with the landscape that this industry produced in Silesia. The smoking chimneys, sombre mining towns and mountains of industrial waste offered a panorama as threatening as it was surrealistic. The immense pollution that these antiquated industries caused was then already a regular component in the communist landscape. Photographing industrial facilities was the equivalent of spying, and Ca¸a was once arrested for taking a photograph of a mountain of coal, but because his car, in which many exposed rolls of film lay, was not searched he got off with 24 hours in jail. Ca¸a made his photographs from a critical stance. He saw the intimidating scale of this industry, compared to the isolated worker, as a metaphor for the communist reality.
