Michał Szlaga started taking photographs of the shipyard in 2000. He had a workshop inside the former head office building, and later even bought a flat with a view over the Monument to the Fallen Shipyard Workers, which commemorates the events of December 1970.
Initially, the photographer intended to show how the former shipyard was being turned into a supermarket, but then decided his book should be a call to preserve the site, or rather whatever hadn’t been sold or razed to the ground already.
The artist described Shipyard Szlaga, published in 2013, as a book on architecture. The images of this decaying symbol of Solidarity tell a story about the price of transformation, and serve as a springboard for discussions on urban development concepts.
In an interview for Fotoblogia.pl, Szlaga listed possible reasons why such a symbol of the struggle for democracy was simply allowed to go to seed: