It was 1999 and I happened to be down in Wabrzezno for Christmas. There was all the media-created hype about the coming of Y2K. I woke up at eight o’clock on New Year’s Day and went out to see what the world looked like in the New Millennium and wanted to take a few pictures to record and
better remember that first day. When I had the photos, I experienced a kind of shock. In the pictures were places that I have known forever and yet they didn’t look the way I had thought they actually looked; they were filthy and ugly. I was hurt by this and decided to carry on with the project. In time I came to see that there was more to it than I was originally aware of, but right at the beginning I did not realize it.
— Krzysztof Zielinski

Zielinski’s style is marked by a mild tendency to make space geometrical. Even in seemingly banal images there are carefully selected spatial
divisions, clearly indicated by vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines, and the planes which they yield. Such objects as little Fiats, bars in shop display windows or characteristic signs on buildings slowly become extinct in big cities and become nostalgic symbols of the small town and the times when there were no McDonalds', billboards and other elements of the so-called "Western world". In the Hometown cycle there is almost no trace of the new reality which arrived in Poland after the fall of communism. Krzysztof Zielinski cannot be said to record reality objectively, yet he is very cautious about commenting on his own representations of it. His commentary is, if at all, sparse and by no means obvious.
— Anna Bujnowska