Grabowski, Christopher
East Side Story
Christopher Grabowski
Late last summer, Christopher Grabowski set up a portrait studio in a disused bank building on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, which is Canada's poorest urban neighbourhood, and let it be known on the street that he wished to take portraits of people who lived there.
Greyzone
Christopher Grabowski
Last year Christopher Grabowski returned to Poland, which is his native country, after an absence of ten years. He found Warsaw to be exciting and vibrant and a scene of great cultural activity. At a gallery opening he heard a well-known film director speak of the poverty he had seen twenty years earlier, amongst the coal dumps in the industrial and coal-mining district of Silesia, which is about half a day’s drive south of Warsaw. The film director assured Grabowski that conditions in Silesia were not like that today.
Markings
Christopher Grabowski
For most of her adult life, my mother, Danuta Rago, was a professional photographer in Poland. In the early seventies she travelled to the Asiatic republics of the ussr and to Siberia. Her assignment was to take portraits of happy members of the collective farms and pictures of the greatest industrial projects of the Soviet empire to be used as illustrations in heavily censored Polish publications.
The Great Game
Christopher Grabowski
The British called it the Great Game. The Russians called it Bolshoya Igra. The playing field was, and still is, Afghanistan. In great games, individuals exist on the same level as grains of silver in a photograph. In the extreme close-up, the integrity of the picture no longer holds, but we can appreciate the shape and features of individual crystals
