Created in the late 1990s by a beginner photographer, the documentary series Suburbia is a record of the socio-economic transformation of Gdańsk and its working-class residents.
The first photographs in this series were taken on the day Lech Wałęsa lost the presidential election in 1995, and the last ones in the year of Poland's accession to the European Union. Wierzbicki became interested in the changing landscape of the marginal districts as a result of their economic exclusion from the organism of the almost thousand-year-old city that built its power on the access to the sea and the mouth of the largest Polish river. The author chose the most symbolic areas of the collapsing Gdańsk Shipyard and the vicinity of the Motława and Vistula rivers with harbours and fishing. These two distinctive areas today represent the global transformations that are now taking place.
Suburbia is an important document, a invaluable record of the decline of old Gdańsk, and simultaneously a contribution to a narrative about the presence and absence of man and the disappearing culture of labour as a value in the contemporary neoliberal world.