Witold Krassowski

All Eyes

Witold Krassowski
All Eyes

30 May 2019 — 14 July 2019

As part of the XI Moscow International Biennale ‘Fashion and Style in Photography-2019’ the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow presents an exhibition by celebrated Polish photographer Witold Krassowski. While working for various prestigious publications such as ‘Liberation’, ‘Globe’, ‘Stern’, ‘Der Spiegel’, ‘Focus’, ‘The Observer’, ‘The New Yorker’ and ‘Forbes’, Krassowski travelled the world and won two awards at the ‘World Press Photo’ contest (1992 and 2003).

Witold Krassowski was born in Warsaw in 1956. He studied French literature, initially at Warsaw University and then at the Sorbonne (Paris), obtaining his doctorate at the Radio and Television Faculty of the University of Silesia (Poland). In 2012 he received a post-doctoral degree at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and has taught there as professor since 2017.

Witold Krassowski took up photography in the early 1980s. He was press photographer for the Polish weeklies ‘Ład’ and ‘Przegląd Katolicki’, then in the late 1980s began collaborating with ‘The Independent Magazine’ and joined the UK photo agency ‘Network Photographers’. He has worked in Poland, the UK, Austria, Russia, Switzerland, Egypt, Afghanistan, Tanzania, Italy, Germany, Mongolia, Bolivia and Kazakhstan.

‘I think I was incredibly lucky in life. For more than thirty years I’ve been given money for doing my favourite thing — travelling the planet with my camera,’ says the photographer. ‘Global historical changes took place in the world, and this created many opportunities for photographers. Although my primary interest was not historical events, but human lives.’

Witold Krassowski is a recognised classic of the humanistic movement in contemporary photography. The exhibition includes 63 images that most vividly characterise the photographer’s creative method and all the stages of his work.

Krassowski sent photoreportage from refugee camps in Tanzania and Afghanistan, photographed people that live in the City of the Dead in Egypt and Catholic pilgrims drawn by the legend of the Virgin Mary’s apparition on Mount Podbrdo in Bosnia and Herzegovina; he has travelled through the provincial towns and villages of Great Britain, talking with the inhabitants about local traditions and regularly receiving invitations to record festivities such as the ceremonial lowering of the maypole at Barwick-in-Elmet, or the Bonfire Night run with burning tar barrels at Ottery St Mary.

‘From each trip I selected at least one shot to realise my own plan: to recreate human life by a logic common to all, touching on themes such as coming of age, survival, life in a group and social transformation. If you abstract yourself from ideology and historical context, it becomes clear that despite variations and individual peculiarities we are all the same,’ writes Krassowski in his foreword to the MAMM exhibition.