The idea behind the exhibition

Warsaw as it was never seen before.

In the real city, on the walkways along Ujazdowskie Avenue, a mini-Warsaw has appeared, with conventional avenues and squares. The exhibition - on close to a hundred large format photographs devoted to the capital by scientist and artist Marek Ostrowski - is sponsored by the City of Warsaw and forms a part of his Polish Avenues Project.

The exhibition `Warsaw as the Eagle Flies' presents space from a perspective which is unattainable to most of the city's inhabitants, but which is unusually interesting and inspiring. As Ostrowski claims, not only do aerial photos provide a new viewpoint, but, in addition, the higher they were taken, the wider the horizon they give to our knowledge about space. The photos are documentary in nature and often artistic as well. Combining elements of science and aesthetics they create an unusual image of a modern city.

The exhibition is organized in the shape of a little town. During the period of the exhibition, over the space of several dozen of meters, Warsaw has been enriched by Constitutional Avenue, Warsaw Invitation Avenue, Emotional Avenue, and the avenues of Space, Inspiration, Interesting Hobbies, Parks, Neighbourly, Filter, and Vistula. These are divided into squares: Panoramic Corner, Clock Place, and Geological Square.

The extremities of the exhibition passage are called Constitutional Avenue and Geological and Vistula Avenues for a reason. The author thus calls attention to the two basic factors that have formed present-day Warsaw and made it the capital: on the one hand, the environmental conditions - the geomorphology of the Vistula river basin and the escarpment, and on the other, Warsaw's constitutional traditions. The remaining thematic avenues, like the effects of past events, including Warsaw's becoming a capital, are stretched between the two.

The idea behind the Warsaw Avenues Project, and the Polish Avenues Project in general, (which began with the exhibition `Gea Means the Earth' with the National Geological Institute in 2004) is to exhibit aerial photographs in the form of a symbolic city street. In 2006, the project obtained the support of the Culture Department of the City of Warsaw, making it possible for Varsovians to acquaint themselves with the photographs. Every aerial photo is different, just like every house, and their vicinity to one another is sometimes only accidental. The pictures at the exhibition, like building facades in a row, are placed to face the street along which we are moving. Particular photos create thematic avenues which are in reality the attractive gates to houses and invite us to come further in. The pictures are gates leading to courtyards of much more significant subjects. Every photo leads to another courtyard. What we see depends on ourselves, but we will certainly, thanks to Dr. Ostrowski's photos, discover the rich subject matter of Warsaw courtyards - both real and imaginary ones - domains of which the city is built.

Aerial photos contain an enormous quantity of information. These are not incidental shots, but were chosen from amongst several tens of thousands of aerial photos made by Ostrowski over just Warsaw itself. The taking of many of these required the organization of special flights for this purpose. Sometimes over a dozen flights had to be made in the course of a single day in order to make one photo. But thanks to this the photos sometimes show unique phenomena.

The photos at the exhibition have been, of necessity, supplied only with brief captions. The exhibition is thus accompanied by a broader presentation on the Internet. The extended commentary can be seen at www.samper.pl.

But even more information and photographs can be found in the Warsaw Triptych books being prepared for publication, of which the first volume, Wars's Gaze, will appear at the end of July, while the next, The Face of Sawa, will appear at the end of August. The third volume of the Triptych - ProjektWarsawa.pl - will come out in October.

Following the great success of the two volume publication of Poland from Eagle's View, which is practically sold out, Warsaw Triptych is already expected to be a significant event. The volumes contain twice as many unique and outstanding photos as there was room for at the exhibition, large as it is.

Dr Ostrowski, specialist in the field of image information, creator of the SCI-ART Independent Image Information Studio, is engaged in work on imaging from the molecular to the aerial level, and on its analysis and interpretation. The photographs he makes have not only scientific aspects, but also aesthetic ones. Ostrowski is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Warsaw and is a member of, amongst other organizations, the Space and Satellite Research Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

He makes the aerial photographs, which are his scientific passion, independently, without the support of any institution.

The honorary patron of the substantive aspects of the exhibition is Katarzyna Cha³asiñska-Macukow, Rector of the University of Warsaw.

The exhibition was co-financed by the City of Warsaw, and its producer is Sto³eczna Estrada.

The Project and the exhibition `Warsaw from Eagle's View' inaugurate the activities of summer Ujazdowska Gallery.