BIOGRAPHY

Born in New Britain, CT, USA, 1985

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

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In 1981, my parents fled an increasingly restrictive Polish-Soviet regime, barely escaping the grasp of martial law, and defected to the United States with their young 6-year-old son (my older brother, Daniel), one small suitcase, and $400. They relocated to New Britain, Connecticut, the ‘Hardware City’, where an established Polish diaspora welcomed them. Born and raised in this Hardware City, some of my earliest memories are conflated with trips to monstrous warehouses, drab industrial parks, dirty construction sites, and unadorned offices. Usually devoid of people at later hours, I was awestruck by the imposing and desolate scenes impressed upon me as a child, charged with drama as if something spectacular had taken place or will take place, much like a crime scene. As I grew up and traveled increasingly further from my hometown, I found similar places scattered across the country, all looking very much the same. Little did I know, however, how much of a role these familiar sites would later play in my work.

Throughout middle school and high school, I largely forgot about the bizarre landscapes that constituted a sizable portion of my childhood memories and concentrated myself into academics and music. I practiced and played the piano for several hours practically every day, playing anything from the contrapuntal fugues of Bach to the atonal works of Scriabin and Schoenberg. Like pianists/photographers William Eggleston and Ansel Adams before me, I found the relationship between photography and music too intriguing to ignore - one essentially freezes time while the other cannot exist without it. Both mediums neatly fill in each other’s gaps. Although I still play the piano obsessively, music as a career eventually fell by the wayside as I thought that life as a performer would be unbearable. I happened upon narrative film production because, at the time, it aligned closely enough with the visual arts I wanted to be involved with. While I wasn’t certain that I wanted to pursue filmmaking as a mere 17-year-old, I felt conscripted into it, as all of my peers were making the necessary higher education arrangements for a career in something.

I enrolled in the film & television program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where I learned a panoply of skills, including directing, cinematography, screenwriting, and producing. Like most of the members of my incoming class, I thought that I wanted to direct, but I was increasingly pulled towards cinematography and screenwriting. The study of camera movements and their corresponding psychological impact on viewers fascinated me. At the same time, learning the order of narrative structures and how character archetypes change over the course of a story helped me better understand an inexplicable world. In general, however, this translated into working as a cinematographer on many of my classmates’ projects and writing dozens of short screenplays, including a few feature scripts. I graduated in 2008 and subsequently made my way out to Los Angeles to begin my career.

After working in Hollywood for a number of years as a movie trailer copywriter and screenplay reader/editor, I eventually realized that a career in Hollywood was not for me. I was, however, fortuitous enough to find my way as a 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 works of various photographers and artists broadened, I found photography to be a more preferable format to convey my ideas because of its inherent control and because its stillness commands deliberately careful observation.

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 and 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, Curran Hatleberg, Jason Fulford, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Catherine Opie, Evelyn Hofer, Rinko Kawauchi, Alec Soth, 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, and Francis Bacon, among many others.