Like most of her projects, Alicja Dobrucka's photo essay I like you, I like you a lot came about spontaneously. In 2010 she received a text message from her father informing her that her younger brother had died. She immediately left her flat in London behind and returned to her hometown in Poland. There she began taking photographs, using her camera both as a "shield from the brutality of the experience" and a way to document the last traces of her brother in her life.
These images, filtered through her melancholic state of mind, are a testament to the experience of loss and remembrance. The series grew into a collection of 42 photographs that confront the precarious situation of society as a whole in the face of death, but also in the face of other onerous issues, such as the troubled economic market, from recent retirees and the unemployed to illegal immigrants and refugees, even soldiers in combat and everyday people experiencing a tragic loss. Interspersed are landscapes that carry a sensibility and vulnerability that carry forward the idea of traveling through various stages and episodes in life. This is a multi-faceted, visceral portrayal of Polish existence as seen through the sensitive eye of a Pole who has essentially emigrated to the west, but maintains a solid emotional tie to the culture of her homeland - no matter how trite, sad or destitute. Dobrucka sees her project as a way to address matters that are usually left unspoken, explaining in an interview with jotta.com,
Part of what it means to live is to face death, and yet I feel we have lost an ability to do this openly in our contemporary culture. I would risk a statement that death is one of the last taboos, if not the last taboo, of our times. I think that since death has been removed from homes to institutions, we are no longer experiencing the physicality of death as we used to.
The photographs in the series were collected into a book published in May 2011 by the London College of Communication, subtitled *some text missing*. A diptych from the series was recently selected by the Ohio-based Manifest Gallery for this year's edition of its International Photography Annual, presenting 83 works by the most promising young photographers on the global scene.
Dobrucka's background is based in documentary photography, yet she strives to endow her works with another layer of meaning. As she herself says, 'What I want to do is to create an effect, rather than a narrative, a meaning, rather than a story'.
Scholar and critic Joanna Zylińska notes that in spite of her funereal subject, Dobrucka manages to 'create openings in the wall of mourning by letting the light in'. She creates a link between the familiar spaces of home with the unknown spaces of death and lament that speak across several generations. Zylińska writes,
It is this generational aspect that anchors the project. Rather than being about the passage of time, and of life, everywhere, every time, the work takes as its focus a group of central European youths in a small urban-rural locality, on their way to a fuller, more mature, life.
Contemporary culture and traditional folk are important themes in Dobrucka's work, often coming together as a universal message on the passage of time and transition. Her most recent project takes the typical motifs of traditional Polish crafts and takes them across the world to reinterpret them within an entirely new cultural setting. In 2011 she launched her Culture Translated project in India, bringing traditional paper cutting design from the Polish city of Łowicz to local craftsmen in India, who reinterpret these highly recognisable patterns in the gurajati and zardozi styles. The effects of this endeavour have been included in the Creative Cities Collection at London's Barbican, a cultural exchange programme between artists from China and the UK in celebration of the Olympic games. The next stage of the project takes place as part of an exhibition of young Polish artists at the Polish Arts Festival in Essex organised by Hungry Arts in late August. This time a local UK graffiti artist takes the Łowicz cut-out to the street.
Dobrucka's travels are her main inspiration as she uncovers the singular and evanescent aspects of local cultures everywhere she goes. Her 2011 trip to Albania uncovered the vast store of the nation's bunkers (some 750,000 of which were built between 1967-1986 under the dictator Enver Hoxa), now slowly disappearing. As Dobrucka explained in an interview with domusweb.it about finding her inspiration, 'I usually work in a spontaneous way, that's how it works with photography, you feel inspired at the moment and you go for it, or the moment is gone forever and you don't feel the same way about the things you are seeing'.