Tomasz Wiech's Photographs of Poland's Misplaced Landscapes Poland is a country of endless Carnival and great disappointment. The Carnival is obvious, and the disappointment is explicable, because things were expected to be different. That line was the sentiment of Michał Olszewski, a writer with whom the photographer Tomasz Wiech often worked at Gazeta Wyborcza, the largest Polish daily newspaper. That dynamic was never too far from Mr. Wiech's assignments, which inspired the soon-to-be-published book "Poland, In Search of Diamonds," featuring his absurdist and abstract work. Since Poland's entry into the European Union, those images contrast the newly welcomed consciousness of Westernization and prosperity with the realities of the socialist past. "It's supposed to be easier, but it turned out just as difficult, though different," Mr. Olszewski wrote in the introduction. Fierce. A country of people forced into tooth-and-claw ferocity. Ferocity with which we cling to the surface of life. Our beauty is the elixir for the in-the-know connoisseurship, prepared for the surprise, hardship, a brave metaphor. Mr. Wiech prefers minimalism and melancholy in his images: A Stonehenge-like cellphone number on the horizon (slide 13). An overpass to nowhere, now an abstract symbol of the incomplete (slide 6). A winter crowd unable to complete a red-balloon-shaped heart (slide 9). Mr. Wiech works quickly and intuitively. Besides using medium and digital formats, he often resorts to a compact film point-and-shoot, trying not to overthink his compositions. He seems interested in contrasting tradition with the new market economy's surreal arbitrariness. "It's a country of cowboys and galloping dinosaurs, camels, dwarfs, plastic bisons, and the biggest statue of Jesus in the world; a land in which the most fantastic architectural form is permitted; a land of the giant question mark," Mr. Olszewski wrote. A country of a great adventure. Born and raised in Krakow, Poland, Mr. Wiech's studied political science and went to work for a prominent Polish daily newspaper. He left after four years, and now attends a photography program at Silesian University in the Czech Republic. Mr. Wiech thinks that this body of work is really about dreams - of a sunnier reality. In his explorations of misplaced landscapes, he seems to find the quirkiness of juxtapositions that, in a romantic, eastern European way, longs for the ease of otherworldliness. So the signifying continues. The sacred and the profane of the urban stations of the cross. Prehistoric parking lot murals. Banality. Billboards as abstract maps of peeling paint. T-rex statues replacing political and religious ones on roundabouts. "On one hand, I like finding the "nothing happens" type of frames, and feel like I've become a little tired of photo assignment's specificity and approaches that one employs while reporting on a subject," Mr. Wiech said. I'm searching for another way of revealing the world besides its direct representation. Follow Lens on Facebook and Twitter.