Warsaw Documentary and Street Photographer

When you view many Mariusz’s (Mario) images, you can’t help but stay a while because there is so much to look at in a single image. He takes full advantage of his 28mm wide angle lens, capturing a fairly wide view to emphasize space and ambiance. In a sense, some of his photos hark of Atget’s visual document of Paris. The one thing they have in common: people going about their lives against the large backdrop of their environment. In Mario’s photographs, the environment plays an equal, if not crucial, role to the humans who inhabit them. As if he is saying we are shaped by where we work and live.

What is fascinating is his choice of environments: shipyards, brickyards, fishing villages, etc.. Places where the environment is larger than the individual. Some of them have an epic quality to them. Yet, you can feel the quiet spirit of each person within the space. In our western world of automation, we forget that there are places that still build or deconstruct amazing things by hand.

Mario rarely shoots one-off images. He spends hours, days, weeks capturing a series of photos so we can experience not fragments, but segments of life. It is the combination of the images that create an overall impression of the subject rather than the reliance of a single image to encompass the message. His slow and patient way of documenting his subjects has given us a glimpse into the resilience of the human spirit.