Krzysztof Szmigielski

Sproxton Award for Photography - 2008 winner

Krzysztof Szmigielski was born in Western Poland in 1980. He studied Photography and Multimedia Communication at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan. He worked in the film industry in Poland before moving to the UK. Krzysztof is a graduate of MA Photography at London College of Communication and 2009 winner of the Sproxton Award for Photography.

The 2008 judges: Gordon MacDonald (Photoworks) / Lydia Goldblatt (MA Photography 2006)

Artist statement

“A photographic image has the property of being perceived as a form of documentary, without having any critical approach to its own principals. This is what distinguishes a still lens-based image from any other medium.

As the shutter is released, it translates time and space into a state of things that is coded onto the two-dimensional space of an image.

That leaves the author and his intentions forgotten, far behind the later process of reading/decoding of any image by the spectator, who translates it back into the world, and locates its content around the items, places, moments that one thinks that one understands.

The two-dimensional item that the image becomes has no ambition to state any guidelines for interpretation. And more importantly, it cannot do so.”