The exhibition at the Fotoforum Dresden shows historical photographs by the old masters and doyens of the "Hirschberg School" (Jeleniogórska Szkoła Fotografii) in Poland: Ewa Andrzejewska and Wojciech Zawadzki as well as artists for whom large-format black and white photography is the most important or essential means of artistic expression. In addition to established photographers associated with the Hirschberg art scene, young talents will also be shown. The exhibition also includes representatives of the Czech and German photography scene. The latter include documentary photographer Jürgen Matschie from Bautzen in Saxony, who took part in several meetings and workshops organised by Wojciech Zawadzki in the Hirschberg area in the 1980s. This year's edition of "Contact Prints", entitled "Time of Nature", is a narrative about the significance of nature in the present. The main motif of the exhibition is the tree, which coexists with humans and at the same time transcends the human scale of time and space in its existence.

The exhibition was curated and organised by the gallery of the Bureau for Artistic Exhibitions (pol. abbr.: "BWA") in Hirschberg in cooperation with the Fotoforum Dresden. It is the latest edition of the exhibition series, which has been taking place in an unchanged format since the 1980s. From the very beginning, the aim was to promote the idea of contact photography. This is a classic process in which the contact print of a negative is created in the darkroom on photographic paper without enlargement or cropping manipulation.

Joanna Mielech (exhibition curator, BWA Hirschberg, PL) and Tomasz Lewandowski (coordinator and co-curator, Fotoforum Dresden)