About.

Somewhere south of Lake Van, up in the Kurdish mountains, we pitched our roof tents around nine in the evening. Empty country, not a single hut, nobody — exactly what we'd wanted. We start getting dinner ready, and a car pulls up: two local guys and a pack of kids. They want us in the village — why sleep out in the middle of nowhere when they have food and a roof. We try to refuse — we really just want to sleep — but they keep raising the stakes, all the way to slaughtering a sheep in our honour.

The host did kill something from the flock (I'm no expert — a lamb? a ewe?), the women got to work at the stove, and we sat down to eat at midnight. Delicious. Once a Turk has invited you in, there's no paying him for the night — their hospitality is, to us Europeans, almost unnatural.

photo: Łukasz Kamiński I'm Zdzisław — Abo, by nickname. I travel with my wife, with friends, sometimes alone, usually in my own 4x4 with a roof tent. Self-drive, because I like being free: nobody rushes me, and if a place is good, I stay as long as I want. An organised tour rushes through the same fixed stops and skips whatever's more interesting just off to the side — and in a group everyone pulls their own way. I'd rather plan the route myself, spend less time in the car and more on my feet. Mountains come up most often — for the view, but also for simple logic: the worse the road in, the fewer people at the end of it.

I've taken photographs since I was a child — my father did, so I did too, first in a darkroom at home, now digital. I shoot whatever's in front of me: animals, rock, empty roads, a sky with no city glow. No single category, no single aesthetic — from astrophotography, for which I'll choose a campsite under the darkest sky, through underwater shots and ethnographic portraits, to models.

The archive goes back decades, and I keep adding old trips, so it grows backwards too.

— Zdzisław “Abo”