Dimensions: 25.5 x 21 cm
Inscribed on the reverse: 'Portrait with cigarette (Solarization)'
on the reverse the artist's stamp
Biography
From an early age he tried his hand at photography - his father ran an atelier in Moscow and then in Lublin. As early as 1929, he held his first solo exhibition. Interested in painting, he studied from 1932 to 1934 at the Graphisches Institut in Vienna. A leading representative of the Lublin Photographic Society, which was founded in 1936. In his photographic work he was influenced by Jan Bulhak and other artists from the circle of the Fotoklub of Vilnius. In his photographic practice, he reached for noble techniques, including gold and bromine in his photographs of Kazimierz-on-Vistula. He specialized in impressionistic landscapes of the Lublin area and genre scenes set in the tradition of painting. In 1944 he was sent to a gulag in the USSR, returned in 1946 and settled in Warsaw. His works of the postwar period are characterized by the synthesis of abstraction and surrealism and the minimization of narrative. One of the main representatives of socialist realism. Toward the end of his life he made attempts with color photography. His work significantly influenced, among others, the environment of the Kielce School of Landscape or the Toronto group Zero 61.
