“Passionate—that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for sake of experience. Passion, that is self-forgetfulness. But what you all want is self-enrichment.”

Thomas Mann showed me the way to the top of the Magic Mountain. How long has it been since my arrival to sanatorium of photography? I don’t really know or might I’ve forgotten. Mann said at the beginning that this will happen to every observant reader. Mark his words my fellow friend of art. What seems as a brief experiment might leave you with a scar that can not heal without intensive treatment. Try to combine Eros with Thanatos, I dare you, and you might find yourself lost in the battlefield risking your life, not knowing which side you are fighting for, like old sport Hans Castorp did. All he tried to do was to mediate between good and evil – ”placet experiri” he told himself not so long ago.

I must also say something about my favourite photograph in a strict aesthetic sense. On it you can see light reflections in the ice that accumulated on a glassy surface, melted through the day and then froze again in the evening sunset. Since I’m very picky when it comes to pixels in my photographs, I will tell you a little secret (very hush, hush mkay?) There is no grain of dust present. I spend three afternoons searching for the best method to remove dust with Photoshop and here it is: I used a history panel combined with dust and scratches filter for the main very fragile part. This method allowed me to manually remove all the dust. I tried to do the same with the background but wasn’t satisfied with result, so I recreated the entire background using original colours from original photograph.