Exhibition of the Griffin Art Space – Lubicz 2016 Prize winner

Wiktor Dąbkowski. Flirtation Cards

There are places hidden in the woods where the healing water flows from the springs. Sanatoriums which were built here for this reason, should gather people who seek to be cured. They are partially financed with public money as a part of public health system, but often Sanatoriums attract people who want to taste not the water but the night live instead. Healing water is just an excuse to leave home. The stay in a cure house is thus dance and night fever.

It is the aftermath of the communism which promised that everyone would afford a stay in a curing house and treated this as vacations. This thinking is still alive in people’s mind. You often can hear stories about cure house life. These are like legends. I decided to check on them, are they myths or true?

The series of pictures taken in Polish sanatoriums touches upon the legends and the reality of nightlife in the cure houses.

 

Wiktor Dąbkowski was born in 1972 in Płock. 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.