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Andrzej Maziec is an artist whose silhouette was permanently inscribed in the landscape of the artistic world of Bydgoszcz, and he is still present in the memory of many inhabitants of Bydgoszcz. Always on the move, always with the camera, from a meeting to the next meeting, but always found time for a friend or a stranger who was accidentally met.
The premature death of the artist surprised everyone, its cause can be seen in the more nonchalance with which Andrzej treated his life, as well as the fact that the boundaries between art and life were always fluid for him. Almost every meeting was an excuse to take photographs; the digital revolution underwent a painless revolution, the digital camera made it easier not only to document but also to 'release' the photographs taken into circulation. He devoted the last stage of his creative activity only to the documentation of the surrounding world and people. A breakthrough in this practice was work on photographic archives to which he found access; or maybe it would be better to tell the archives that met him. He was always attentive to vernacular photography, and in his actions he freed it from utilitarian labels, giving them a different, often transcendent dimension. This was the case with negatives after the liquidated photo shop at Długa Street, which Andrzej saved from destruction. This collection consists of several hundred evidence photos, wedding photos, First Communion photos and family portraits arranged in the atelier, which are currently in the collections of the Museum of Photography. From three boards of 100 x 70 cm, on which Andrzej attached self-made prints from randomly selected negatives, he created a peculiar table of anonymous Bydgoszcz residents from the 1940s of the last century. The faces themselves detached from their identity, arranged according to an obscure key create a kind of strange portrait of the past time, forcing us to reflect on the present moment. In one of the scenes of the film "Association of Dead Poets," Robin Williams leads students to a display case with photographs of former school graduates, there he asks them to look closely at them, saying that the characters from the pictures lived the same desires as they do today, when they pretend to focus the boys' attention on the pictures, he stands behind their back and guttural whisper repeats Carpe diem. A similar effect was achieved by Maziec, but this project, like so many others, Andrzej realized in a minimalist form. The information that it was implemented at all is due to the three boards left at the Museum, and no other trace of the project could be found anywhere. The collection of negatives remaining at the Museum is an excuse to continue the artist's thoughts on a larger scale and with a larger scale, which will bring both the interesting idea and the silhouette of its creator.