PERCEPTION OF THE UNNOTICED
Now, forty years later, I can say, that such were the beginnings of my life with the camera; one of my true passions in life to which I have been faithful and in which I have found a way of looking at the surrounding world.
In 1962, when I was an undergraduate student at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow and also actually lived in Cracow, my father bought me a sophisticated (at that time), high quality East German camera, a Praktina IIa. Later, I also used a Praktisix II, a 6x6 cm camera. My darkroom was also much improved and I began making large prints. In the sixties I established the main themes of my photography: trees, wood, stone and rocks; the texture of things. Other themes were architecture, and people, usually old and with interesting faces. I mostly took pictures in Cracow, Wadowice and the vicinity as well as in the rocky Tatra Mountains.
In 1967, soon after I began my work at the Institute of Nuclear Physics, I met Mr. Ted Petryna who, apart from being a chemist, was an artist-photographer. We became friends and he was truly impressed by my photos. He showed them to his friends, artistic photographers, and discovered my "Hartwig sense". (Mr. Edward Hartwig was then the leading Polish artist photographer.) Ted Petryna taught me picture composition, techniques of focusing, cropping, consistency of picture, deep black planes, and strong black and white contrasts in the printing process. By such techniques the prints frequently become graphic art or engravings, even though not done with one of the traditional graphics techniques.
I follow Ted's teaching all the time, although since 1984 I have totally shifted to colour photography. I must stress, however, that the now 90 year-old Edward Hartwig, whom I never met in person, influenced me very much in my quest in artistic photography. Hartwig perhaps never attained such technical excellence as, for example, Anselm Adams, but Hartwig's photographic perception seems to me to be more personal than Adams' in his otherwise wonderful mountain landscapes. I should also mention that two world famous photo exhibitions, Edward Steichen's "The Family of Man" and Karl Pavek's "What is Man" ("Was ist der Mensch") I saw in Cracow in the sixties, had impressed me profoundly. Perhaps these were my inspirations for photographing old people. Many years later, an album of the Magnum Group confirmed my previous choices of the photo subjects.
For a few years, in the late sixties and early seventies, I was an official photographer to the famous Cracow intellectual cabaret "The Cellar Under the Rams" ("Piwnica pod Baranami"). Then, in the seventies, I photographically documented the childhood of my son Peter and my daughter Magda.
In 1973, I left for Oxford, UK, for two years. One of my first purchases in England was a new camera, an Asahi Pentax with several lenses. Oxford, English towns, English gothic cathedrals, even the British Museum replaced my earlier Polish photographic themes. As a physicist, I also travelled extensively to many countries in Western Europe. On those occasions, I visited a number of old cities and admired them through my camera. I was also in Moscow, where instead of discussing physics, I was taking pictures of old Orthodox churches (none of which was in service).
Architecture is a difficult theme for photographers since it requires that the resulting pictures conform to two requirements. First, they convey the atmosphere, the "spirit" of the building, different for each; and second, the picture should not be a one-more-repetition of a view already known from many postcards or books.
Over the years, the core of my photography has remained unchanged: tree, wood and stone. In Poland I followed my previous photographic routes, some trees had disappeared, but I noticed new ones. Once, my late father-in-law looked at my pictures of trees and said: "Well, very nice, but you will not be able to take pictures of all the trees." True. But, it is worthwhile to take pictures of as many beautiful trees as I can see. It is somewhat similar to the famous Casanova's opinion of his liaisons with beautiful women.
In trees there is the "Spirit of Tree." Who is the Spirit of Tree? - one may ask. The Spirit of Tree is its strength, power, the ruggedness of bark, the magnitude of boughs, the subtle tangle of branches, the rotten mould, the tormented roots above the ground. And the rustling.
In the late 1970s, several times I went to the widely known Easter Passion enactment in Kalwaria Zebrzydowska in Poland. What remained from my "journeys to glory" is the photographs of old people, sometimes pitiful beggars, people with beautiful, rugged faces, the unknown people who are no more.
In the summer of 1981 my family and I left Poland for Oxford and stayed there for two and one half years. From Oxford, I travelled to Spain, Italy and Greece, obviously with my camera.
On December 31, 1983 we landed in Toronto, Canada. My new life in this country had begun, also in the photographic sense. I changed to a new Pentax and almost exclusively to colour photography, taking pictures mostly in Alberta, Ontario, Québec and occasionally in the United States. Fortunately, my collection of some 2,000 large black and white prints, and the negatives were sent to me from Cracow. My main photographic themes have remained unchanged. There is perhaps no place other than Canada with plentiful, beautiful, colourful trees (Tom Thomson was one of the first to notice it), and no other country with such magnificent yet reachable mountains like the Rockies. Colour photography has opened new major theme for me, for which colour is necessary: flowers and autumn leaves.
The twentieth century comes to and end. Among its characteristics, both tragic and joyful, it was a century of the most impressive artistic photography, particularly black and white. I have topically selected a number of my black and white photographs taken in the years before 1984. I hope you enjoy them. Thank you.
Andrew Kobos
