I have always been fascinated by the powerful visual effect emerging from the contrast of stage lights and the artist’s silhouette they create during a performance.
It took ten years of honing my skills by taking photos at concerts with a traditional analog camera for my photography to reach a place where I can confidently control every part of this process - from planning, shooting, processing, retouching to preparing the final photos.
The creative process I developed became a passion I love to be immersed in.
DOING IT LIVE is a series of my on-tour collaborations with artists in 2022 and early 2023.
These three little exhibitions are the result of a decade of developing my skills and vision, and it’s a strong starting point for further explorations.
The name is taken from the tour tagline of The Dillinger Escape Plan - the band which was one of my biggest live-act inspirations. It connects everything that is the most important to me while I attend a concert - the power and emotions of artists while performing, intensity of the lights behind them and flow between artists and the crowd.
I love to play with it in my photography and that’s what I’m about to show...
I've been doing photography since 2009 when I bought my first SLR camera - a digital one. Two months later I spontaneously bought an analog SLR camera as an experiment. It was a Nikon F65 (to which I owe 13 years of developing my analog photography).
For the first years I learned photography techniques using both cameras - digital and traditional. I mainly photographed with a digital one, analog was rather a part of an additional workshop and my passion for this process.
However, at some point I realized digital photography required constant investments in equipment and became an eternal pursuit of a technically perfect image that never gave me a sense of satisfaction. At that time analog photography became for me an escape from digital techniques. The possibility of reducing the number of buttons and options in the camera to 3 basic ones and working on film with its technical limitations made it possible to forget about technological frustrations, focus on what is the most important in the image, develop the workshop and, above all, change the approach to the image, its specificity as well as the way of taking pictures. It quickly turned out that analog photography is where I felt more freedom.
At the beginning I photographed landscapes and cities, it allowed me to gain experience in analog photography, get to know the properties of films very well and ... fall in love with its aesthetics.
Over time, analog photography began to replace digital. The satisfaction from this process was so compelling that in 2015 I gave up the digital camera entirely and focused only on the traditional one.
Since I was brought up in the spirit of music and concerts, artists on stage and concert lighting have always been a huge visual inspiration for me. When I set off on an adventure with photography, I started it with the thought of combining these two passions so the dream of being a concert photographer quickly emerged.
Leaving digital photography in favor of traditional made this road longer, but focusing only on the use of analog photography at concerts resulted in finding the perfect space in photography for myself.