For decades the photographer Krzysztof Gierłatowski has portrayed eminent Polish figures thus creating an invaluable visual testimony This time his victims are wellknown citizens of Kraków Stanisław Lem one of the most brilliant versatile and unapologetically cerebral science fiction writers author of Solaris Krzysztof Penderecki one of the most esteemed and widely discussed Polish composers of the 20th century and Wisława Szymborska Nobel laureate in Literature in 1996 one of the few women poets who has received the Swedish prize Gierłatowski assumes the role of a modern Stańczyk a legendary thinkerjester prophesying on the historical Polish Republic in his dramatic conviction that History annihilated the intellectual elite of his nation and the future will bring awe and destruction
