Maciej Markowicz has spent years learning to work with time rather than against it. His photographs are what happens when he stops trying to extract moments and simply lets duration accumulate.
Orange glacial rivers. Magenta forests. Peaks glowing like embers against inverted skies. The colours are wrong—and that is exactly the point. These are colour negatives: what the eye knows as blue appears orange, green becomes magenta, white turns dark. Markowicz does not correct them. He presents light’s own handwriting—the raw chemistry of photons meeting silver halide crystals on chromogenic paper, unmediated by lens, sensor, or algorithm.
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.
The moving darkroom
The camera is a van. Blacked out completely, it becomes a walk-in camera obscura—the same optical principle Aristotle described in the 4th century BC. A single pinhole on one side lets Alpine light stream in, projecting an inverted image of the outside world onto photographic paper hanging on the opposite wall. Markowicz controls the shutter from behind the steering wheel—and drives.
During each eight-second exposure, the van moves through the landscape. Distant mountains stay sharp—they barely shift relative to the camera. But nearby trees, bridges, riverbanks dissolve into flowing colour. The blur is not a flaw. It is time made visible. What stayed still inscribed itself. What moved left its trace.
