What relation can be established between a portrait and a landscape, between a community and a territory? Light answers, say the photographs of Bogdan Konopka, for it is light that shapes the real. With light, for several weeks the photographer immersed himself in what was the mining basin of Nord-Pas de Calais and set out to meet the descendants of the Polish immigration of the early twentieth century and of the smaller, more recent one of the 1980s. The transformation of the landscape goes hand in hand with that of the community of Polish origin, scattered, heterogeneous and at the same time of a delightful liveliness. Konopka decided to bring the differences to light and to share them. What is the slender thread that links those animated by a culture, through the prism of a heritage sometimes transmitted and sometimes lost and wanted back, with the living, torn history of those who, for economic or political reasons, had to go into exile in order to go on existing?