After a while, an immigrant can become stateless. Gone for too long from the motherland, but always foreign to the place they’re now calling “home”. Reminded daily of that blurry identity: the supposed accent of their voice, the spelling mistake in their name, the not so subtle change of expression when they tell where they were born.

When I posted these pictures of my husband’s hometown for the first time, his mother said that I was not showing a good image of Poland. Only the old and the broken. Her words never left me, and I even felt guilty for a while.

It took me years to understand that I didn’t take these pictures to show what Poland actually looks like, but to be a visual translation of the invisible but sometimes crushing weight of not belonging that my husband carries.