Christopher Grabowski’s photographs and photo essays have been published in the Globe and Mail, Maclean’s Washington Post, Neue Zurcher Zeitung and other periodicals. His most recent exhibition of photographs was Guns, Kites and Dreams (Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Halifax). Christopher Grabowski is a recipient of several awards, including the Michener-Deacon Fellowship for investigative journalism.
ere.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. »»
day.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. »»
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 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
