Lewczynski, Jerzy

Jerzy Lewczyński was a prominent art photographer in Poland since the late 1950s. Born in 1924 in Tomaszów Lubelski, located in the southeastern part of the country, he studied at Politechnical University in the city of Gliwice from 1945 to 1951. He worked in the chemical industry for thirty years while concurrently pursuing his interest in photography. Gliwice turned out to be a vital center for avant-garde photography in Poland, and in 1959, Lewczyński was featured in a notable three-person show, titled "Antiphotography", with Zdzisław Beksiński and Bronisław Szlabs. In 1958, he became a member of the Union of Polish Art Photographers (ZPAF) and a few years later, he joined the organization's Artistic Council. Through the 1970s, he made photographs that deploy symbolic objects as a way to shed light on everyday life and works that expose the ways we "read" photographs. In the years since, Lewczyński was interested in what he described as the "archeology of photography" and his works centered on the reuse of found negatives and abandoned photographs.