A weekend in Kraków | Photography Focus 1 – Urban details

As regulars of The Daily Norm will know, when I visit a new country, and all the more so when I visit a city, my eyes are alive taking in all of the brilliant details which so often cluster abundantly, ripe for the picking, before me. I love photographing the places I visit, and not just the postcard views or the tourist hot-points where visitors gather for poses. Rather, in my photographic contemplation of a newly discovered urban space, my eye looks for all of the little details; often the ones which many a superficial glance may miss, or dismiss as ugly or unimportant. As my adventures in Lisbon demonstrated last Autumn, I love nothing more than a city which exudes character not through glossy renovations, but rather through tired dilapidation, through cracking walls which ooze history; through the empty bottle telling a half tale of the drinker who abandoned it on a windowsill; through the electricity wires which hang haphazardly across a street, feeding electric life into the many households around them.

For sure, Kraków simply dazzled with its array of picture-perfect charm-filled streets, with its gleaming gold domes and impressively baroque copper cupolas – and my many photos exploring those gems are still to come. But there’s another half of Kraków too, away from the tourist heart; the city which tells of its residents and its more recent past, which exudes something of the hard-edged spirit of a city which has fought through invasion and suppression to remain a centre of enlightenment and education, and which simply charms through the sheer character of its dilapidation.

These are my photos which focus on those urban details which can so often be missed. I hope you enjoy them.

All photos and written content are strictly the copyright of Nicholas de Lacy-Brown © 2013 and The Daily Norm. All rights are reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. 

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• A weekend in Kraków | Day 1 – Jewellery box city (daily-norm.com)
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• A weekend in Kraków | Day 2 – Kings, Communists and the Kazimierz Ghetto (daily-norm.com)