For the last couple of months, almost a year, I faced a deep doubt about the sense of my photography. I stopped to photograph and focused on other things. Also on looking at others, reading about photography and challenging myself.
I started my photographs being fascinated by portrait, but mainly landed in portraying models – women, girls, who generally came to pose and to be photographed.
It was to train the technique, not just of the photography but also the technique of portraying – of looking deeper into a human being. But this was just a training. Not yet the REAL portrait for me.
In the meantime I got also fascinated by movies – especially older, mainly black and white movies, the French Nouvelle Vague, Godard, Antonioni, Skolimowski. The content, but especially their – sometimes revolutionary – kind of cinematography, and – yes! – of portraying people, but maybe especially of telling a story.
My mind started to think more and more how to combine, fusion, melt these interests and fascinations plus the training already done (meaning some technical capability) into what I am doing as photographer.
And here I am at the starting point of the journey.
On one hand – I left the models and started to photograph fully “private” people. These are the first 3 portraits of my series The Cracow Boheme devoted to people known in the nightlife milieu of my town. Jacek, Ola and Magdalena.
The Series will be also published separately.
On the second – I started to invent and arrange other picture series in order to tell cinematography-like stories. Here you can see excerpts of two of them. One in color and one in black and white. I call them all together with one basic name “Tell Me The Story”. Neither of the stories has to be explained by me. They are not written, nor finished or even started. They are an invitation for you, the recipient to fantasize, to invent, to imagine, to tell yourself an own story out of them. Isn’t this was photography is (was?) all about?
The Series will be also published separately.
FORMAL REMARKS
For both of the directions I went in, some – although simple, but still important – formal rules have been set. (Of course above the one general rule that I only shoot analog pictures.)
For the portrait series of the Boheme I set 3 rules:
1. The picture has to be in black and white (even if for some reasons converted from a color film)
2. No professional photographer’s light tools can be used – means only natural light or a light that is at hand at the place we shoot (“normal room lighting”)
3. The pics have to be taken either in the portrayed person’s place of living or at home where I live (kind of a privacy setting).
For the cinematographic series I set 1 rule:
1. The form of the picture must apply as much as possible to the content in general. Especially the lighting and the choice of the film has to stress the cinematographic idea behind. This is why I use either black and white or the CineStill film, which is a project based on Kodak old Film Tape and a studio lamp which is not a typical photography lamp but rather reminds of a film studio equipment.
