Artist statement

I was a press journalist. Apart from one author’s photographic exhibition, I have not let myself be known in public with such presentations. My articles and photos appeared as press publications. In retirement, I photograph mainly for my own pleasure.

    My photography often tends more towards the fine arts (visual arts) than the documentation of what the eyes see. I am close to conceptual photography. But I also manipulate reality in search of atmosphere and visual artistic effects. I process urban, forest and water landscapes. I come from Warsaw’s Stare Miasto district and I like to photograph this place. I also like to photograph skyscrapers. Street art has a charm to me, lwhen street jugglers show off with fire.

    The slow human consciousness glues the moments of the event into film. But time is a magician and cuts seconds into many images – more or less realistic. I often photograph horse races, selecting individual moments from them. In the horse gallop you can find accents of impressionism and surrealism.

    I am fascinated by the beauty of the Cosmos – We have just entered a stage of human civilization development when we can see the true picture of the Universe with our own eyes. But the human environment is also, in a sense, the cosmos. Extraterrestrial beauty can be found even in such trivial images as … the process of picling cucumbers.

    An artistic goal can be achieved in many ways. More than 160 years ago, the pictorialist C. Jabez Gughes said that an artist is free to use resources to realize his ideas:

If it is impossible to take a picture from one negative, use two or ten. Everyone should understand that these are only means to an end. And when an image is ready, it must be judged by the effect, not the way it was obtained.

    In my youth, I was an apprentice for a year in the darkroom and atelier of a then-known artist photographer. He was a documentarist and portraitist in the monthly magazine “Polska”, gathering the best Polish photographers. The magazine went down in the history of photography of that period. In this time I learned the basics of photography and my first pictures appeared in the press. Unfortunately, my professional plans were thwarted by a vision defect. I had trouble focusing my photos. It was only in the next decade years that a cure for this defect appeared – cameras with autofocus. But that was later. I graduated from, among others, the faculty of Journalism at the University of Warsaw, and photography did not become my main profession, but an accompanying one.

    Artists focus on a selected segment of art and use the developed style to give rise to perfection or boredom of the audience – Personally, I look for creative inspiration in various topics and ways of imaging. I am no stranger to thinking known from advertising techniques. To enrich the content, I sometimes overlay photos or combine a photograph with a painted image. From time to time I create still lifes and abstracts. Sometimes a creative idea flashes through my head like a meteor, other times it is the result of a long calculation.

    My portfolio also includes attempts to combine photography with poetry.