Adam Krawesky Interview

by Davin Risk

MakingRoom: You have a background in a variety of disciplines, both technical and creative. It seems like your dedication to photography started about 6 years ago. How did that come about?

Adam Krawesky: I played with point and shoot film cameras from a young age, probably like many other kids, but I would only shoot a roll now and then, and wonder why the pictures that came back never seemed to look like how I remembered feeling when I saw the scene through the camera's viewfinder.

In early university I wanted to start a bit of a visual record of my friends at the time, so I got a point and shoot film camera. It progressed quickly from that to a used Kodak digital point and shoot. I was hooked on digital, and the next camera was an Olympus e-10 to teach myself SLR photography. I photographed my friends a lot, and the city at night, but buildings, not people. As soon as I shot the first frame on the e-10, I felt at home, it was love. I enjoyed it so much that I started photographing everything, for the joy of looking. Eventually that combined with a love I’ve always had for wandering streets and watching cities, and that's when I began photographing streets in earnest.

MR: There is a strong narrative trend that runs through most of your work. You're a writer as well as a photographer so do you see the two as informing each other or are they quite separate processes?

AK: I wrote much more before I began photographing things, but the writing has waned. I do write from time to time about something that happened while I was out making pictures, so there one does literally inform the other. The physical act of being stationary and writing is the opposite of walking the streets to make photos, but the creative act has more in common, at least for me. Writing for me is a form of wandering, a chosen path through a maze of possibilities, and so is roaming the streets with a camera. Both are tedious and physically taxing, occasionally interrupted by a surprise of discovery.

I’m not sure that I try to create a narrative in any picture that I make, instead I hope to make a picture that engages someone else to make their own narrative out of it. I think the same can be said for good writing, something that strikes a balance between vagueness and comprehensive description in a way that draws the reader in enough for them to want to create their own story to fill the gaps.

MR: Your work became increasingly driven by street photography and especially figure-ground studies. Was this an intuitive process for you or did you have defined goals at that point?

AK: I had always wanted to photograph people in some way in the streets, candidly, so it was a defined, yet general goal from early on. I moved to Toronto from Ottawa after finishing school because it seemed like a good place to try that. I came up with a project to force myself to engage with people in the streets, where I approached strangers and asked them to pose with their hands covering their faces. This helped me get over the anxiety of confronting a stranger with a camera, and while I was searching for subject over the months of this project, I became more comfortable photographing people without asking permission.

The figure ground studies (i.e. old guys and walls) came about accidentally, which I suppose is a form of intuition. Early on, I photographed an old man standing in front of a red wall, which at the time was unremarkable to me, but after I downloaded and edited the photo, looked at it for some time, there was something very engaging about it that I couldn't quite understand. The photo received a lot of feedback wherever I posted it, with similar reactions.

There’s a balance between the attraction of a strong decorative image (a bright red wall) and an ambiguous personal presence that draws me in far enough to hold my gaze, but keeps me at enough of a distance that I have to, and want to make up my own story about what's going on in that picture. Other variations are someone striding against the background of a wall, again there's an ambiguity for me that I haven't quite understood, there's something in the weight of the person's motion through the space that appeals to me for reasons that remain unclear.

I’ve repeated this picture a million times, and admittedly the variations on a theme do get boring but I still don't fully understand the draw of this image to me, so I’ll keep making it until I get it.

MR: The narrative that arises from your work is quite subjective and often relies on reading expressions and body language both for the viewer and I'd assume in your own instinctual way as you take the photos. Has the exercise for you of engaging and observing on the streets made you more attuned to people and does that make the act of taking the photos easier or more complex?

AK: I’m more attuned to people in my own way, my own language, but I don't know if I can say that what I read in a person's gesture, cadence, or expression is what they mean to write. I think that I’ve developed an instinct of physical flows in the street, looking ahead and knowing where people will be, who will interact with whom, where trajectories will intersect. This definitely helps me in making pictures on the street. Being more sensitive to emotion in the streets can make it more difficult to make the photograph, since it's intrusive and emotion is private. I often feel conflict between wanting to photograph someone because I sense strong emotion there and wanting to leave them alone for the same empathetic reasons. Usually I make the photo.

MR: Some street photographers see themselves as documentarians. I don't get the sense that your work aims to catalogue or to be purposefully complete in a view of a particular city like Toronto. Do you see a responsibility in what you do to represent or are you more interested in exposing the universal in the specific?

AK: I’m not a documentarian. I see documentary as a prolonged study of a particular issue in a particular time. Documentary aims to be purely representative and objective. I feel no responsibility to represent, although i know that many of the photographs I make would be valid documentary images to be used in someone else's broader representation of Toronto from this time period. The photographs I make are questions, questions to myself and to other people. “Am I interested in this image? Are you? Why? Why not? WHY NOT?” (joking). Slowly over time I’ve built up a very small dialog about form and color, gesture and expression, public and private, and that's what I’m interested in exploring.

MR: I actually think that repetition as a valid artistic and investigative exercise has been lost somewhat with the notion that artists are under more pressure now to show progress or "newness." How does showing your work online function for you? Do you feel the pressure of an "audience"?

AK: I see repetition as a successful device constantly in the institutional art world, especially in contemporary photography. I didn't study art in school so I can't say why, but I see a strong preference to projects that are defined by tight repetition on a theme, as a way to study it. That’s not a criticism, just an observation. Except for that damned photograph every photo art student makes with some forlorn domestic individual sitting on the corner of a bed staring out at the viewer with a blank expression. That one sucks.

I’m represented by a gallery and so I have a foot in the gallery world, which has provided me with a contrast to showing work online. They’re very different worlds. The gallery world has a very specific set of viewers, and the viewing time for your work is very limited. Showing my work online provides a democratic function for me. I see it as a constant source from which to broadcast my ideas. I like to know that once the ideas are sent out into the internet cloud, they have a life of their own to bounce, replicate, change, and die, and I’ll never know about it save for the few emails I might get from time to time from someone telling me they liked what they saw.

I feel enough pressure from myself to produce that the pressure of an audience is secondary. I purposely removed comments from my site a long time ago because it created a very limited, useless dialog. I look at my stats sometimes; it's only then that I realize people are actually looking at the images. I produced very little this winter and nobody emailed to ask why, so I don't think I have much external pressure from an audience.

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Adam Krawesky is based in Toronto. For more information, check inconduit.com