Maciej Markowicz
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Selected Works
Motiongraphs (2015-2026)
A photograph is usually a moment — one instant, held still. These artworks, called Motiongraphs, offer something else. The window that makes the picture is itself travelling while the light is still falling on the paper, so what the sheet records is a distance crossed and a length of time lived, laid down as one thing — because inside a moving camera they become one.
Eight seconds of light through an aperture, onto a single sheet of colour paper, in a van on a Brooklyn corner or a barge drifting down the Seine in Paris. No film, no file, no second print. The sheet of photographic paper on the wall is the one the light touched, and what reads as blur is the ground moving underneath the camera.
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Biography
Biography
Poland , 1981
I’ve spent years learning to work with time rather than against it. These photographs are what happens when I stop trying to extract moments and simply let duration accumulate. I work in complete darkness while moving through space. Light writes itself onto paper over several seconds. What appears isn’t a frozen instant but layered time—the way experience actually feels before we try to pin it down. These artworks don’t freeze time. They let it accumulate on the paper the way experience accumulates in memory—as layered duration, not isolated instants.
After earning his bachelor’s degree in photography from the University of the Arts London in 2010, Markowicz has continued to experiment since 2015 with his signature mobile camera obscura technique. He creates unique large-format chromogenic negatives on paper using mobile camera obscura devices, exploring light, time, and movement through 8-second exposures on photographic paper. In 2017, with the support of a grant from the Goethe-Institut and the German Federal Foreign Office, he designed a Camera Obscura boat, aboard which he undertook a year-long artistic journey through Europe’s waterways.
Currently based in Berlin, his work has been featured in international institutional exhibitions since 2011, notably at the Tate Modern in London and, more recently, at the Polish Institute in Berlin. Markowicz’s works are also included in art collections such as the French Museum of Photography and the German Bundestag’s Art Collection, and have been featured in publications such as L’Œil de la Photographie and the British Journal of Photography.
