In the heart of Białowieża, one of Europe’s last great primeval forests, scientist Simona Kossak and photographer Lech Wilczek have chosen to live out of step with human time. For more than thirty-five years, they have shared their daily lives with ravens, lynx, wild boar, elk, roe deer and foxes, making this ancient forest their home and the animals their true family.

Bringing together a previously unpublished selection of photographs from their archive of nearly 5,000 images, this volume offers, for the first time, a beautiful book dedicated to this fascinating archive. Through the changing seasons, the images depict a life lived in close harmony with the forest.

Both a personal archive and an ecological fable, Białowieża, la forêt vivante de Simona Kossak & Lech Wilczek, draws us into a world that seems to belong to the very origins of Europe, where the forest is still a living being, a repository of memory, mystery and a haunting, dreamlike quality.

Afterword by Pierre Chatagnon, of the Francis Hallé Association for the Primary Forest.

Publication date: November 2026