Fotograf Magazine

In the high season of customers storming shops, Tytus Szabelski found a job with Amazon. At first sight, it is hard to imagine how much the photographer infiltrated the company’s warehouses in Poland. The pictures taken up until now as part of a project focused on Amazon seem distanced from its subject. Although the artist got into the depicted buildings as a true reporter, the effect is far from an ordinary “behind-the-scenes” photo reportage of Amazon. From a formal point of view, Szabelski’s new series is a follow-up chiefly to stylistics of the so-called “new topographers” of the 1970s, which had seeped through the author’s earlier work, focusing on the depiction of the mutual flow between the material and the non-material. In practical terms, the Amazon series amounts to a complex analysis of the inner workings of these late-capitalism factories, which call for another kind of depiction, different from pictures of exhausted workers standing by production lines.