Portrait Photography

Hands

2010-05-25T10:55:00.012+01:00

There are hundreds of sculptures of hands on display in the Musée Rodin (79, rue de Varenne - 75007 Paris), . They are beautiful, delicate, pregnant with intentions and ready for constructing new events.

Rodin knew, as we all do, that hands create our lives.

We stroke hands of those, who need us.

We hold hands with people we love.

We write letters typing or holding a pen with hands.

We make morning coffee and raise a glass of deep red wine in the evening with hands.

We wash hands of children with our hands.

We wipe tears from our eyes and cover our mouth while bursting into laughter with our hands.

We support ourselves on our hands, when we decide to stand up-side-down.

We play on powerful instruments with hands, thus creating emotional and memorable sounds.

We move forward with a hand guiding us into an open space

We touch the world around with our hands to acknowledge its presence.

During recent weeks I was very busy setting up my new exhibition of photographs. While doing so I have met with people who are very dear to me, but whom I didn’t see for a long time. And we shook our hands and we put hands on each other shoulder and we felt warm emotions flowing naturally between us.

We love the world around us with our hands.

Falling in love

2010-04-17T11:40:00.011+01:00

Taking portraits of people is like falling in love.

Maybe it is brief, maybe it is long term ..... but it still is falling in love with all exhilarating emotions and attention to a person and exclusion of everything else erupting in seconds.

I don't usually announce this to loudly, just in case it would be misinterpreted, but nevertheless it is falling in love.

With Rob it was sheer wildness of youthful (even if menacing) energy

With Harrison Birthwistle the observant gaze

This little Dutch girl was so charming that I could only adore her

But, to be honest, that manner of taking portraits comes more naturally for me, when I work with women.

And out of falling in love comes having fun together

Not forgetting intensity of being together

So let us prepare ourselves for May, the month of Loving

The way we stand

2010-03-11T21:55:00.005Z

Weeks, days, minutes pass.

And seconds.

Time passes and we pass through days and nights.

And we change and evolve… don’t we?

When we are tired we go to bed, where we dream intangible stories for a few hours until excitement of a new day inspires us to leap out of it.

We can hardly distinguish by how much that sleep made us different to our yesterday’s selves, but little by little, in an elusive manner, we become somewhat …. not-quiet-the-same, than we were years ago.

Today, purely by chance I had looked at two photographs, two portraits of mine, which I took twenty five years apart. Obviously, I am aware that I grew older in physical terms, but (surely) that body is still a home to the same character, the same personality, the same curious Bo, who is eager to explore the human civilization to the full. Yet, all too often, I realised that while I may have learned more, I also, in at least even measure, forgot just as much. I possibly experienced new things, but I was bruised on a way just as equally.

I put two images side by side.

Both cameras are Canon, even if one is A1 and the other 50D.

I am holding them in a similar manner.

Hair, jacket, sweater, background place myself in vaguely different situations.

But that is almost superficial.

I went out to meditate.

When I was walking over the bridge, I understood the crucial, fundamental difference: the key is in the way I stand.

And, you know, this flash of thought helped me to place myself within my current reality.

Thank you Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, William Henry Fox Talbot for the gift of photography!!!!

Smile

2010-02-26T11:27:00.017Z

Well, today I am smiling. No real reason, no excuse, no specific event caused this natural grin on my face … but it doesn’t matter, does it?

Perhaps it is due to fate or an amazing arrangement of stars or birds singing or just me being myself?

Or maybe it is to do with being alive?

Any answers, please....

I never ask anybody to smile, while I take portraits of them and yet many of my sitters do.

Suddenly they look at me hidden behind that black box with a glass lens sticking out of it and they smile. Just like that.

Bohdan Pociej is a gentle man and so he smiles gently too.

I don’t know why Krzysztof Meyer smiled to me. I think he felt a bit shy.

Why Marina Warner was smiling, while I was taking this portrait is lost in history.

Maybe I looked funny and Connie Raichert was amused?

I think that I look serious enough while taking photographs, don't I?

What do you think?

A prayer

2010-02-19T14:54:00.008Z

When a dramatic encounter with Life strips away all nice and pleasurable aspects of daily existence, we are faced with the core essence of our being.

In days like that we may (like myself) search for reassurance in visual art or may read poetry, listen to music, go for walks. This is when our culture gives us an abode into which we can pour powerful emotions and to search for guidance, as to what to do next.

Alternatively I could meditate, cook a meal, wash clothes and simply accept what had happened.

But we all know that it is not easy to quell one’s heart.

So, instead I looked through photographs I took years ago of a play “Iphigenia in Tauris” by Euripides, when it was staged in London. Most of them were classic images of the theatre performance showing action on stage. But one was different. Here the exposure to the harshness of the situation is shown without its setting or narrative. Here a person is faced with a tragedy, which is beyond explanation or reason.

It all came back to me. I was in an auditorium, and while planning my next shot I noticed that a powerful light concentrated all our attention on two people in the middle of the stage, leaving other performers in deep shadow. The central couple were as if suspended, away from all what is mundane, trivial, unimportant.

I decided to accentuate what was crucial in that moment and to ignore all what is irrelevant by choosing a long lens, which cut out the rest of that scene from the frame. While printing this photograph on a high contrast paper, I strived to achieve almost abstract visual forms. I suppose, almost subconsciously, I was creating a simple image of an extreme feeling.

It is because the profound emotions are straightforward and all embracing.

Like a dancer at the apex of a jump.

Like a prayer.

“Iphigenia in Tauris” by Euripides

Camera Mamiya 645

Lens 210mm f=5.6

speed 1/125 sec

Fuji Neopan 400 ASA

Albert van Nierop (Kew Gardens)

Canon lens 50mm f=8

Speed 1/250 sec

Fuji Neopan 400 ASA

Home

2010-01-27T16:53:00.010Z

The city centre and passages between Cambridge University and Caius & Gonville College were full with graduates in dark coats. Graduates’ parents were gleaming with pride, while not-yet-graduates were racing dangerously on the same pavement. A tour guide was explaining to a group of Chinese students the mystery of a perpendicular style of King’s College Chapel and I was walking behind a lady with three, small children sitting in various contraptions, which were precariously attached to a bicycle frame. The oldest girl was holding a puppy in her arms and kissing it from time to time.

That sort of medley of events attracted me to Cambridge in first place and years later this fragment of the World became my home.

It was a warm evening so I went towards a river Cam for no other reason than to be around, when sun is setting down and mute swans are herding their cygnets to nest for the night. As I didn’t want to interfere in their intimate relation I strolled towards Magdalene College, walking by the edge of Jesus Green. It was then that a man in his thirties, but with long, greying hair approached me. So I stopped, but as soon as I turned towards him, he had fallen into a momentous hesitation, a gap in his decision-making processes. Suddenly, as if pushed from within by a stronger force, he described himself in a most elegant language as a former homeless person who, because of his personal convictions became an impoverished outsider, briefly a drug addict and a very lonely man without love or friendship. He was not overbearing at all, and lapsed from time to time into insecurities arising from our brief relation. He was just given a chance, a chance to have his own bed under a common roof. “This bed is my home”, he said proudly, while giving me a shy, slightly uncertain gaze. “I will settle now and one day I will have a family”, he added, but voice gave away his awareness of the intimidating conditions, he found himself in. On this note he decided to bit me farewell and walked forward with great urgency towards Midsummer Common. I looked at his striding figure, wondering if he would ever be a happy man.

I do not know. But I also knew the intensity of passion, the power, which may help to structure one's life out of bits in hand.

At some point of my life I too was close to sleeping rough, but managed to find a tiny flat to rent, on the very edge of a large estate, in Nowa Huta, home to thousands of steel mill workers, most of whom grew up in small villages near Krakow, in Poland. My flat, on the fifth floor, exactly above the entrance, was placed in a symmetrical centre of that block of one hundred flats. It was perfectly contradictory to my childhood home, which was a street away from the Market Place, the epicentre of the Old Town, but now five miles away.

All my neighbours worked shifts in a vast, monstrous, industrial complex, which bulged dark smog, while I was a rebellious artist and not shy about it. They were for real and I was alien. They did all proper things and I put paintings on a ceiling and windows.

I felt banished from the excitement of all what inspired me at that time, while they often let me know, that I am an intruder in their midst. Yes, I had a place to sleep with five flats above my head, but in my mind I was homeless.

One day my urban friends decided to come over to see my den and to cheer me up. While I was making dark, thick, Georgian tea, Joanna was cutting a chocolate cake, they brought, Mark was repairing a broken toilet and Yola was looking through the window at a green field with one remaining peasant’s shack in a middle of it.

- I feel at home – she said.

- Do you?! – I was astonished.

Later on we went for a walk, towards that dwelling still inhabited by a couple with three sons. Yola talked to them and I took some photographs of Joanna.

Subsequently we ended up visiting Yola’s friends, who just moved into a converted loft in a block near by.

Twelve or so hours later, while I was walking back to my flat at sunrise, I passed a neighbour on his way to work.

- Good morning – he said

- It should be a lovely one – and I nodded my head

It was the day when I took a large painting off the window.

Cambridge: Canon Digital IXUS 100 IS

Nowa Huta: Pentacon Six with Ilford HP4

Until now

2010-01-21T00:57:00.013Z

I was searching for some random information in a book about Indian art, when pages opened, like wings of an albatross, and there was a photograph I took years ago in Musee d’Orsey, in Paris.

A girl in nude and her black cat are looking at me.

A couple from Far East are fidgeting with information about a Museum (?).

A lady, dressed like a person from a Parisian studio, is observing the couple.

A servant is paying attention to a model on a painting.

And I imagined myself taking a photograph, while all of that richness of criss-crossing gazes, happened in front of me.

I remember being disappointed, when I saw this picture for the first time. So, I used it as an irrelevant bookmark. I didn’t notice its true rationale.

Until now.

While clearing up a far corner of my desk, under a postcard with a cubist painting by Georges Braque, I noticed a small print of a woman in a white dress.

She is walking in a flowing manner in front of a solid, hard wall of the Bank of England.

I remember so well that fleeting moment, a fraction of a second, when she suddenly turned her face towards me, while I was just about to release a shutter. In that amazing coincidence her body, her personality was like a Greek statue.

I didn’t see it at that time. I thought that it wasn’t sharp, therefore not good.

Until now.

On a high shelf, in a spare room, I keep old prints, which never made it to my exhibitions.

They (I decided on those occasions) are neither here nor there.

They were still in my house, but only just.

They were on their way out.

Today was a day of reckoning and as I was checking them up at a rapid rate, eyes of a Dutch rock star pierced into mine.

It was taken during a wild time, while I had travelled throughout Holland for days and nights with his band, which did their best to live up to their “bad” image.

It was all in his vulnerable, sensual, unpredictable face.

I always thought that it was just a document of those hundreds of hours, which we spent together on the road. I didn’t see that this was a portrait of a person who went too far. Or maybe not far enough.

Until now.

At that point I decided to search for a portrait of one of my students. Once I asked him to stand in a studio, in front of a meaningless board. I needed to test a set up I had arranged using powerful strobe lights. I took a single frame. Then something happened (I don’t remember what) and the project was aborted.

Later on, as it was my habit, I printed that image, along with rest from that film. This was it.

Now he is looking at me and I don’t even remember his name. Yet, he appears to have been so real, true and intense, when he stood in front of me, while I was focusing on his eyes.

I created all those images only to reject them later. Until now.

Tonight they are spread out on the table.

Suddenly the disparity between what we do instinctively and how we measure the results became obvious to me. I saw with my own eyes that it all depends on the conscious (often too rigid) perception of ourselves and some current expectations. That we choose to miss what is original, what should amaze us, only because it is too unusual to our routine manner of thinking.

“Never again” I informed a little statue of Shiva, which is sitting on my desk.

Shiva said nothing …. I suppose this is his (wise) manner of being in this world.

Maybe I have to learn this too.

Bridges and havana cigars

2009-12-11T22:24:00.016Z

Visiting new places is always unpredictable. It can be charming, but it does not have to be. It can even hurt, if you poke Things and People too far.

Yet, I was for ever planning to go “somewhere” to meet the “unknown” and to feel overwhelmed by the sheer presence of living.

In Paris it was an incredible art from all ages, an intensity of streets, an amazing architecture, phenomenal vistas and cheeses of capricious character. Plus wine, parties, late night talks about the meaning of life with all kinds of immigrants; all submerged in singing and playing on guitars.

When I desired to centralize my soul, I would stand on a bridge which tzar Alexander the III presented to the French as a gift and from behind those figures (gilded in gold) I would watch a View. To this day I don’t understand the reasons behind it, but that is how it was.

London was different, but here I understood that this city is beyond any form of overview. That simple observation appeared out of the blue, while I was standing in an Irish pub, in the basement, just off Piccadilly Circus, drinking Guinness, smoking havana cigars and listening to various musicians, who played there after a whole day busking in tunnels of London Underground. Smoke was dense, voices somewhat like Deep Throat from “All the President’s Men”, dark nectar was creamy, smooth and strong.

Then, at late hour, I would stand for a while on the Waterloo Bridge. Unless it was raining.

Amsterdam is natural even if events are extreme. The wholesomeness of Dutch culture is like a field, which allows all to flourish. Crossing this bridge on Prinsegracht is like walking around one’s own home. Coffee is often just as good too.

I remembered that once I went to a meeting in a house near by that cafe and there seventeen people were discussing (in English) the ways to run a hostel, in which most of them were staying. Not a single person was Dutch and we came from seventeen countries.

One day we were standing there, water gently flowing under our feet and a bird with a huge wing span, flew above us. A friend of mine told us that this was a rarity and then we drunk St.Emillion wine, while he was cooking Spanish food.

And so, by and by, I came to Cambridge, but before that I smoke my last havana cigar on a Clare Bridge, across the Backs and watch boats, ducks, swans on the river. I looked at them and thought “Yes, it makes sense”.

So I sold my house in London and moved to Cambridge. A few days later I came back to the Clare Bridge to say “Thank you”. It was a beautiful afternoon.

It all leads to a place without a bridge, to a little town, almost a village, in a middle of Poland and yet far away from people pushing you off the pavement in a hurry. This place has a market square and a few streets. Yet, for many centuries stories were born here, painters were seduced by light alone, writers weaved their stories, affairs flourished, music was played, friendships were formed, ideas shared, tears wetted faces and laughter rebound in small canyons.

Does it mean that all of it can happen even without crossing a bridge and smoking a havana cigar?

Obviously yes, but not that often. Perhaps Kazimierz Dolny nad Wisłą is unique?

Gliding

2009-12-03T19:46:00.007Z

It was a grey day.... neither her nor there, so I went to the Fitzwilliam Museum to buy Christmas cards. While there I didn’t drink coffee, because I prefer it somewhere else, but instead went to see a display of Japanese and European fans (a stunning seminar of ways to seduce and charm), an exhibition of lithographs by Odilon Redon (softness and intensity and shyness and magic all at once) plus a show of their recent acquisitions. Here I stood for a long time in front Modigliani’s portrait of a man with a black beard, prints by Goya, Picasso, Joan Eardley's sketches of young boys and Degas’ ballerinas. The pure spontaneity of those images made them so alive, so present in my life that I couldn’t move away for the fear of missing them.

Silly, isn’t it. After all, that is why they were bought; so they stay in Cambridge for all of us to pay them a visit from time to time.

A bit later on I sat in a Cristine Patisserie (Brazilian) and ate a strawberry and fresh cream cake, drunk coffee and dreamed about that warm day when I rested against a rock on a Cornish coast, inhaling salty wind blowing from the Atlantic Ocean. I was thinking about a night before, about an evening with friends, when we simultaneously watch Sun setting down and Moon rising up.

Special event.

But I also observed birds, seagulls as they were gliding on coastal winds. There seemed to be a pattern to their paths. Intrigued, I decided to take a photograph of a bird as it comes away from behind the rock on a surge of upward wind.

Next, I looked at a little island in front of me. It is a birds’ paradise.

I noticed that there was an outline within its surface , so I decided to take a picture of a flying bird set within that frame. I came as close as I could and across a surging tide of water I followed a seagull to the right place.

Just a few weeks later I’d met up with Albert in London and we worked together. And this is what happened then:

Albert

Canon A1 with a standard lens (50 mm)

Film Neopan 400 ASA

Cornwall

Nikon F75 with a zoom lens (approx 240 mm)

Film Agfa 400 ASA

Advice

2009-12-02T14:35:00.009Z

Beginning of December, bright day, garden filled with light and I am selecting images for my second exhibition in three months.

Portraits of so many people I photographed over so many years are spread out and stories about them flood my mind. All those brief encounters (always unique for me), those first impressions, which I was turning into timeless images...... I remember every detail; the mood, the conversations, the intensity of two personalities facing each other.

When I was taking photographs of Andrzej Wajda in the National Museum, in the middle of Kraków, he pointed at a visual inspiration for his films: a vast painting of wildly running horses pulling a sledge. Since that moment I cannot think about them in any other way. Later, when we stopped on a little square, where I used to live in Kraków, Wajda told me never to postpone, what I really want to do in life, but get on with it as soon as I can.

“Don’t store your Best Idea for later. Use it now, because in time you will have an another Best Idea”.

Years later he filmed some scenes for “Katyń” on the same square.

A sunshine shone on a portrait of Tade Kantor, a painter, a stage designer and an archetypal artist.

This one I took in his gallery, where he also staged experimental plays. Sharp, direct light outlined his profile.

I liked Kantor a lot. I liked that he was both a showman, an intense performer, but still an intriguing painter who had “a perfect visual pitch”, if one can say it like that.

“If you are at one with your audience and you are true to yourself, you will be alright”

Now, I am the same age as Wajda and Kantor were, when I had photographed them. Sometimes I repeat their advice to others, sometimes I repeat their advice to myself, when falling asleep or making plans for the future. Well, today I am only choosing images for the exhibition. Some other day I may need to make a life changing decision, but their words will help me to move forward.

Maybe they also learned these thoughts from others, I don’t know.

“Advice is at the core of creative society. It is like a well of wisdom, but it is up to every individual person to drink from it in the time of need” a friend of mine told me, while we were drinking wine in his shelter, a tiny room on the sixth floor of the squatters house, in Amsterdam, on a freezing day in December some time ago.

Black and White photographs: camera Pentacon Six

Portrait of myself camera Nikon F75

The Defense of diversity

2009-11-30T22:53:00.029Z

While driving around Provence, in southern France, I was so happy, because everything around me was smiling. Light permeated the landscape, white rocks, from which most houses were build, were soft in texture and fields upon fields of vineyards held a promise of a soothing drink for years to come. Markets ... well, they were also exquisite and village-like, as if they came from somebody's painting. The choice of inspiration was endless.

Provence, being painters paradise, was overflowing with images at each turn. On every plaza keen artists, dressed like post-impressionists, were perfecting their skills with brushes and with eager-to-be-squeezed little tubes, which contained small quantities of oily paste in colours as bright as houses around.

This was a bliss, so I carried on sniffing jasmine flowing gently from shops selling herbs and drunk black coffee.

Yet, the dark side was never far away. All this beauty was surrounded, protected, restricted as if there was a possibility of snatching, poisoning, ripping it out from its soil.

Almost every village had a city-wall, towers and tiny windows on a ground floor. The Papal palace in Avignon, with a facade looking like a mediaeval armour, dominated the square below in a rather oppressive manner.

On my way back to a village, where I was staying for a couple of days, I stopped for a few hours at Arles,

paid homage to the Blue Cafe, made famous by Vincent van Gogh and went to see a river Rohan because the day was sunny and seemingly friendly. And there I encountered a powerful, cold wind, which was skimming the surface of the river thus creating short, dangerous waves. It was blowing like a dark monster under a soft name, mistral. It chased me away from the bank of Rohan.

The next day I decided to become more urban and I went shopping in Nimes. I am fascinated by that town, with its streets zigzagging into each other, following their ancient reasons.

Nimes is like a book I bought from an archaic bookseller with a thin, grey, goaty beard, a type of a strange person you will never find again, however hard you search. I sat with my volume of incomprehensible wisdom at a cafe, opposite a theatre. With every turn of a page I saw mysterious symbols and words written backward, while illustrations were glowing like windows of gothic cathedrals. There, in that cafe, I ate lunch and drank wine, which a young waitress had chosen for me and I also listen to a man at the next table, who was playing on a guitar and sang Bob Dylan’s songs. Sometimes he changed English words into French and this was very charming.

It was all gentle, air was warm, palms shaded us and life was good.

I decided to try coffee in another place, by Roman temple, so I walked off and on my way I encounter a lady in white with a white dog, so (being a tourist) I took a photograph of her.

The icy look she gave me and a manner in which she entered a shop with golden jewelry wiped a smile from my face. Her dog ignored me.

I looked down the passage, towards the corrida for bullfighting and just then I understood that it was me who crossed a border line and not another way round. It was me, who was intruding into intimate lives of people for whom Provence was their home, peering over the fence and asking for attention, when they had other ideas how to spent their time.

It was clear that none of those defenses were insurmountable. My son could scale a city wall in two seconds, I could ignore imposing buildings by looking another way and laugh at disapproving faces. Or simply not to go to places, where one is not welcomed. This would be easy.

Surely, I also put up my defenses, when I feel threaten or imposed upon, but I don’t notice doing so, because ... because it is instinctive.

Yet, I know that I will trespass again and again. I will search for Unknown wherever I go. Human destiny is such that we are curious and wondrous. We will for ever touch what we suppose not to touch, embrace what is forbidden, because by doing so, upon learning that lesson, we become wiser.

Perhaps, what we often miss is to pay attention to the fact that people, who made it possible for us, by living in a distinctive manner to us, should be appreciated and not be trampled upon.

Camera: Nikon F75 with a standard lens (50mm)

Different exposures

Film: Agfa 200 ASA

Observations

2009-11-27T18:51:00.011Z

Parties are very busy events which I seldom understand. People eat food they would never touch at home, drink wine without checking labels, talk to random people and sometimes settle some issues or aggravate them. Maybe there are parties full of wildness or easy going fun or deeply thoughtful conversations on subjects ranging from philosophy to biochemistry, but I seem not to gatecrash into them.

Or maybe I spend too much time watching others and following their thoughts, that I miss a point of being at a party?

I admire their eyes, lips, gestures too much to concentrate on the art of sleek one-liners and I pitch my mental ware to them either too fast or not fast enough.

After a few hours I walk home to a glass of red wine from St.Emillion or Riesling of golden hue and absorb the mood of personalities I encountered that evening.

This, I like.

Yet, I love those events on occasion, because I learn so much about ...??.. I don’t precisely know what is it, but those observations are rich for me in human texture.

I was in Granada another day, on a terrace with a view of the famous Alhambra Palace and mountains of Sierra Nevada. I spent a long time there not only because of the townscape or the flamenco music played superbly by two guitarists or tourists who kicked football about, but because of two girls who were taking photographs of each other.

They twirled around, played with hats, blouses, scarves, make up and taught each other yoga poses. These ladies were totally, perfectly, exclusively wrapped up in themselves and it wasn’t irritating to the rest of us. They were having a party and this was nice.

Nothing more, nothing less and that is plenty in itself, isn’t it?

Camera: Nikon F75 with a standard lens (50mm)

Shutter speed: 1/125 sec

Aperture: f=11

Film: Agfa 200 ASA

Bound for adventure

2009-11-27T13:35:00.014Z

On my way to the station I walked over a cycle bridge, which spans a number of railway tracks and serves for children as a gallery from which they watch trains coming and going or being washed by giant brushes.

I was going to a meeting in Bloomsbury, to talk about my forthcoming workshops, Portrait Photography in Brief, but before that I went for a walk in the City of London, the financial heartland of England. The dynamics of that place, the energy bursting forward is perfectly set within its architecture, narrow passages and turbulence of crowds spilling into pavements with their laptops, briefcases, mobile phones and posh shopping bags. I always choose to walk between two buildings: expansive, almost overflowing Lloyds Insurance Headquarters

Then to The October Gallery, good talk and back to Cambridge, but as I had to wait for my train for a while, I went off to wander around St.Pancras, the station which is the London terminal for the Eurostar trains. It is all glass within nineteenth century vast structure, which protects travelers on a move, bound for adventure from wind, rain and snow.

Not a long time ago Roman and I

boarded such a train to Paris, where we spent a few days marauding around; Roman was

breakdancing and I was attempting to choose right places to eat at low prices.

One day we walked through the newly opened grand facade of Louvre, through a court of Cour Carree, emerged at the main entrance and Roman took off in a bouncy manner. The classical palace and the modern, glass pyramid became a stage within which his energy flew upwards.

I kneeled down and shot.

Camera: Nikon F75 with a standard lens (50mm)

Shutter speed: 1/250 sec

Aperture: f=11 or 16 (not sure)

Film: Agfa or Kodak (don’t remember) possibly 400 ASA

Natural beauty

2009-11-26T20:05:00.015Z

At nine o'clock I received a letter from a very important person in my life. At half past nine another very important person left a message for me on an answer-phone, but I had no time

to respond, because I had to quickly phone a person (wonderfully important to me) before leaving for town. As I was shutting the front door a mobile phone rang and this time a forth very important person called me asking some probing questions.
All these ladies, at various times, had or have a powerful impact on my life, but today I needed to be alone.

So, a minute later I switched all available means of communication off and went for a peaceful walk to the Botanic Gardens.
The day was blissfully beautiful, sunny and quiet.

I wandered about, until finally stopped at the lake and there I met a gardener, who was clearing the undergrowth.

He asked me where do I come from and (being Polish) I told him the truth.

Then we moved to the subject of the city I spent my childhood in (Krakow) and the meaning of botanic gardens, which are like temples of goodness.

These bamboo, which surrounds you here, was the first to be planted in any botanic garden in England - gardener informed me, to which I replied that it is so natural to meditate here.

After our conversation he went off to do some real work, while I gazed at an acer with leaves like flames and a photograph of Lucy Bethune, a dancer with Ballet Rambert appeared in my conscious mind.

I took this portrait of Lucy in London, in a park near the river Thames. My idea was that a natural and yet man-made environment, would provide a perfectly contrasting stage for Lucy's elegance, grace of movement and cool sophistication.

At first I was asking Lucy to do some simple steps, but she clearly wasn't at ease on the uneven grass and with birds flying above. It was so, because her contradictory personality, while brimming with hidden passion, equally strives for control and correctness. Sensing tension (which I always like during a photographic session) I followed with giving Lucy confusing directions in order to make her less self-conscious. Eventually she ended up standing within branches of a tree and by now Lucy was amused but still in charge of herself. Almost as if looking for me, Lucy peered from behind the leaves with gaze of piercing intensity, while I was taking this picture.

Top: Camera Pentacon Six

Lucy:

Camera: Canon A1 35mm with a standard lens (50mm)

Aperture f=8

Shutter speed 1/125 sec

Film: Neopan 400 ASA