BIOGRAPHY

Born in New Britain, CT, USA

New York University - Tisch School of the Arts - BFA (2008) in Film & Television Production | Honors Scholar Graduate

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In December of 1981, my parents embarked on a harrowing journey, narrowly escaping the tightening grip of martial law and the escalating political repression in their native Poland. With only a single small suitcase and $400 US dollars, they fled to the United States, seeking refuge from the tumult plaguing of their homeland. After crisscrossing several countries, they finally found sanctuary in New Britain, Connecticut, a city renowned for its burgeoning Polish émigré community. Known as the “Hardware City,” New Britain stood as one of North America's largest manufacturing centers, offering promise and opportunity to newcomers like my parents.

Born in New Britain, my childhood unfolded amidst the backdrop of blue-collar life within a predominantly Polish-American immigrant community. Early on, due to the financial constraints and a lack of affordable childcare options, I would sometimes accompany my parents to their respective workplace. Whether shadowing my mom or dad on their shifts, I routinely found myself amidst imposing warehouses, dreary industrial parks, and stark office buildings, their hushed halls devoid of human activity during the twilight hours. These excursions became an integral part of my upbringing and ignited my interest in prosaic landscapes. As I matured and ventured beyond the confines of my hometown, I encountered similar vistas scattered across our nation, each bearing a striking resemblance to the places I once explored as a child. Only later in life did I fully comprehend the profound influence these familiar sights would exert on my evolution as a visual artist.

Fueled by a deep-seated love for visual arts and music, my journey as an artist began at a young age. Despite not initially excelling in any of the visual arts as a youngster, I pursued these passions fervently, exploring the works of great artists while also delving into art theory and composition. This exploration laid the foundation for my eventual transition into large-format photography and conceptual art, which became my primary means of creative expression. However, during my early teenage years, I also immersed myself in music, specifically piano performance. I dedicated countless hours each day to practicing the piano, in the process exploring everything from the intricate fugues of J.S. Bach's to the avant-garde and atonal works of Scriabin, Prokofiev, and Schoenberg. Like photographer-pianists William Eggleston and Ansel Adams, I found the relationship between photography and music too intriguing to ignore - one medium freezes time while the other cannot exist without it. In an oblique way, each medium fills in the other’s gaps. Although I still play the piano obsessively, music as a career fell by the wayside as I reasoned that life as a performer would be impossible due to my persistent stage fright. In high school, encouraged by my well-received filmmaking projects, I gravitated towards narrative filmmaking, which I saw as the best medium to combine all of my various artistic aspirations. Enrolling in NYU's film school, I delved into a diverse array of disciplines including screenwriting, producing, directing, cinematography, and editing. After graduating, I ventured out to Los Angeles with dreams of a career in filmmaking.

After working for a number of years as a movie trailer copywriter and screenplay reader/editor, I realized that a career in Hollywood was not for me. I was, however, fortuitous enough to land a job as an assistant/studio manager to a well-known celebrity portrait and fine art photographer. His office was filled with art and photography monographs that I gleefully enjoyed in my downtime. As my understanding of the medium deepened, and my knowledge of the imagery of various photographers and artists broadened, I rediscovered still photography to be an excellent and preferable format to convey my creative ideas because of its inherent control as well as the fact that I can practice it independently, with minimal equipment and a small team of family members or friends, if need be.

Currently based in Southern California and the Tri-State area (encompassing New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey), I’m an artist specializing in documenting the ever-changing landscapes of industry, workplace, labor, leisure, and technology’s exponential progress and its precarious relationship to nature. Primarily using large and medium format film cameras, much of my work is sparked from the alien topography that permeated the sights of my childhood, scenes that I still find worthy and challenging enough to recapture and distill into a single image. Although some of my works are ‘straight’ photographs, many of my works are composites. As nothing I photograph can be a true facsimile of my recollections, tools like Photoshop help me compose an image according to my memory’s eye. Nonetheless, my works will foment different interpretations by other viewers and that flexibility of analysis is what also makes this medium so remarkable. Photography is one of very few deductive arts out there. Every other art that I can think of begins in some way with a tabula rasa - a canvas awaiting paint or a concert hall awaiting dancers and lights. Photography begins with a world that inundated with content, and you need to sort out what’s meaningful within a limited frame.

There are countless other photographers, painters, and visual artists who have inspired me that I feel indebted to, including Victoria Sambunaris, Jeff Wall, Lewis Baltz, Todd Hido, Paul Graham, Bernd and Hilla Becher (and many of their students, including Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, Jörg Sasse, Axel Hütte, and Elger Esser), Gregory Crewdson, Larry Sultan, Simon Roberts, Collier Schorr, Curran Hatleberg, Ilona Szwarc, Jason Fulford, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Catherine Opie, Evelyn Hofer, Rinko Kawauchi, Alec Soth, Gregory Halpern, Thomas Demand, Edward Burtynsky, Joel Sternfeld, Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore, Robert Adams, Frank Gohlke, Olivo Barbieri, John Chiara, William Eggleston, Richard Misrach, Mitch Epstein, Diane Arbus, Bruce Davidson, Albert Renger-Patzsche, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, August Sander, Paul Strand, Saul Leiter, Walker Evans, Uta Barth, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Justine Kurland, Hannah Starkey, Nadav Kander, John Humble, Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts, Matthew Rolston, Slim Aarons, Guy Bourdin, Franco Fontana, Mark Rothko, Josef Albers, Caspar David Friedrich, Giorgio de Chirico, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Ed Ruscha, Yayoi Kusama, Julie Mehretu, Joan Mitchell, James Turrell, Dan Flavin, and Francis Bacon, among many others.