Piotr Cieśla – cycle from the 1981 report on the lives of the residents of the Nursing Home in M. near Warsaw

The report comes from 1981. I did it for almost the whole year at the Nursing Home in M. Near Warsaw. Patients are boys under 18 years old. The director kept the elders so that they could reach adult homes as late as possible because the material is quite extensive, in this series I decided on portraits of boys, giving up typical reporting aspects of reportage.

The photo exhibition took place in 1982 under martial law, but after a few days due to censorship interference it was closed. It was a poster for an exhibition of a boy in a straitjacket behind a fence. The poster was not delivered for censorship approval.

Since then, these pictures have not been shown or published anywhere. As far as I know, this is the only report in the history of Polish photography from a social care home for the mentally ill. If similar materials exist, they were implemented solely for training and teaching purposes.