Steven Lojewski – Bio

Steven Lojewski works within the documentary tradition of photographers such as Eugene Atget, Henri Cartier Bresson, and Robert Frank. His fine prints depict the architectural and social landscape of the city - buildings, industrial sites, and the evidence of human presence in the urban landscape. After spending many years working only in black and white, Lojewski embraced the use of colour in 2001. His earlier works of the 1970s and 1980s including the Rooftops series, Steel Cities and Populace explored the expressive possibilities of black and white to great effect.

The images in Boulevard of Dreams (2003) featured the sort of vistas that may not catch your eye as you drive through urban streets. Lojewski works like a modern day flâneur, walking, unhurried, down the same streets that most drive, an observer rather than a participant. He suggests both the physical (boulevards) and the emotional (dreams) with a meticulous eye for composition and colour. The views he presents, such as a lone figure in an office at dusk or the angles and tones of a inner city freeway show attention to the often overlooked details of structures and artefacts that make up our urban environment.

In his previous work Urban Dilemmas (2001) Lojewski captured the beauty and foibles of contemporary urban life. A sense of the photographer's humanity and humour pervades the images in this work. Looking at the world with an anthropologist's eye, he reveals us to ourselves. His enjoyment of the effect of available light on colour film is evident - the cast of a fluoro light over a room - the luminosity of a single red rose in a sunfilled green garden - apricot coloured napkins on a table set for two.

Regardless of subject matter, Lojewski's work is always about photographic vision, about how the world presents itself through a camera lens. His images show delight in bizarre conjunctions, subtle detail and he has a longstanding fascination with the spatial ambiguity of the photographic plane.

Steven Lojewski has exhibited widely since 1974. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Photography at Sydney College of the Arts. His work is held in many private and public collections including the Australian National Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of NSW, Art Gallery of South Australia, Art Bank and Griffith University, Queensland. Some of the images in Urban Dilemmas were shown at Ivan Dougherty Gallery as part of Perspecta 1999 and were also shown in the 1999 Leica Documentary Prize and Exhibition at the CCP in Melbourne, which subsequently toured to cities and regional galleries throughout Australia.