Texts

Maciej Markowicz’s Motiongraph #108 shows Le pavillon de Flore, of the Palais du Louvre, as seen from the Seine. It consists of three singular paper negatives assembled as a triptych. The three juxtaposed images remain separate, their heights adjusted slightly to construct a coherent visual whole. There is an immediate tension between the venerable building rising above the eternal river and the image’s epic scale, bold chemical colors, and almost electric energy that assert its contemporaneity. In this arrested moment there is the sense of permanent stillness we expect in photographs, especially of familiar places, but here there is also a depiction of motion, inherent to the artist’s unique personal process and philosophy.

There are many photographs of the Seine and its environs, beginning with the efforts of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre himself, in 1839, when the process he discovered was only a few months old. As early as 1851, Édouard-Denis Baldus began his epic documentation of the monuments of France, contact printing from large paper negatives that captured light on stone. His image of the pavillon de Flore taken from the bank opposite at quai Voltaire is focused, detailed, and enduring. Motiongraph #108 employs materials and scale that would have astounded photography’s 19th century pioneers, yet its subject, its process, its intention and its vantage point would have been familiar to them. Like his esteemed predecessors, Markowicz uses the technical tools and artistic choices at his disposal to create a permanent representation of a momentarily captured view. He does so with a strong awareness of the river as a metaphor for the passage of time, and the photograph as a record of a fleeting moment made permanent and still.

Markowicz uses the camera obscura, a profoundly simple and ancient apparatus consisting of a darkened room with a small hole in one wall, sometimes fitted with a lens. Light from outside the room passes through the hole and projects an image onto the wall opposite it. The image appears upside down and backwards although it remains uncannily precise in perspective. By positioning large sheets of color-sensitive photographic paper where the projected light falls, he creates a one-of-a kind chromogenic paper negative, which he presents as a singular work of art in its own right. Markowicz’s darkened room takes the form of a handcrafted boat designed to be all-at-once camera, transport and dwelling. In it, the artist has travelled the rivers and canals of Europe, from Berlin where he is based, to Amsterdam, Hamburg and Paris. His captured glimpses are taken from mid-river. The camera that captures the light of a few moments is moving on the river as it flows.

The camera emerged at the start of the industrial revolution. It was viewed as a technical wonder, the magical workings of which were perhaps of greater interest than any particular image it might produce. Fascinating as it is, Markowicz’s personal artistic process for producing an interpretation of a few moments on the river should not distract us from the strong and evocative images he makes. Today, the photographic artist has a wide range of tools to choose among, but it is the artist’s vision that drives those choices. Paris, where photography began, remains one of the most photographed cities in the world. This photograph takes its place within photography’s history, and the history of Paris, as a moment captured in the flow of time.

Maciej Markowicz occupies a unique position in contemporary photography. Since 2015, the Polish-born artist has transformed vans and boats into mobile camera obscuras, creating large-format colour photographs that do more than merely document their surroundings. His images record the passage of time, capturing the fleeting qualities of the world as it unfolds before a small opening. By using the camera obscura — a device that projects an inverted image of the external world through a pinhole onto a surface inside a darkened space — Markowicz emphasizes the temporal and perceptual processes involved in both seeing and recording landscapes.

Markowicz began developing his mobile camera obscuras after experimenting with exposing chromogenic paper directly to light, a process that encouraged him to integrate the act of making with the material outcome of the photograph. Drawing on the legacy of early optical instruments, he adapted their principles to his own working conditions by converting vans and boats into walk-in cameras. Inside these darkened spaces, he positions sheets of photosensitive paper and controls the shutter from behind the steering wheel. Through long, roughly eight-second exposures, he incorporates the movement of the vehicle and shifting conditions of light and weather, allowing his navigation of the landscape to become inseparable from the images he produces.

The distinctiveness of this method led Hans-Joachim Gögl, artistic director of INN SITU, to commission Markowicz to photograph Tyrol and Vorarlberg, regions in Austria renowned for their mountainous terrain. Between July and October 2025, Markowicz travelled from Berlin in his camera obscura van to produce single images and diptychs of sites he had scouted across the Alps. Presented at the BTV Stadtforum in Innsbruck as part of INN SITU’s programme marking the 200th anniversary of the first surviving photograph, made by Nicéphore Niépce, these works extend his exploration of time, movement, and perception within the context of the Alpine landscape.

The resulting photographs are distinguished by vivid, luminous colours — greens, yellows, oranges, scarlets, and blues — that flow across the surface, imparting them with a sense of fluidity and motion. Within these atmospheric expanses of colour, the outlines of trees, rivers, and clouds appear as fleeting impressions, while the contours of mountains and valleys remain discernible, grounding the images in the physical terrain. Human presence emerges only indirectly, through faint suggestions of roads, buildings, or bridges that merge with the surrounding snow-covered peaks and forests. Occasional glimpses of the photographer’s presence — a water bottle or stray equipment — enter the frame, offering understated reminders of the image’s material and procedural conditions.

The works consider how colour inversion, motion blur, and extended exposure shape the viewer’s experience of the landscape. The diffused chromatic fields shift attention from direct representation toward the interplay of line, contour, and texture, introducing a perceptual ambiguity that resists fixed interpretation. Motion blur draws together successive temporal moments, creating continuous forms that emphasize movement over isolated detail. These effects generate rhythms of light and shape that guide the eye across the frame, while incidental objects serve as discreet indicators of process. The viewer is encouraged to navigate the images perceptually, attending to evolving relationships and visual cadences and encountering the work as a temporal experience rather than a static scene.

This perceptual complexity opens onto the central force shaping these images: the passage of time. Long exposures transform static views into dynamic records of intervals in which light, movement, and weather accumulate. Time becomes embedded in the image, allowing the viewer to experience the landscape as both observed and remembered — at once frozen and fluid. In this way, the images reveal the landscape and the act of perceiving it as intertwined temporal processes. Such attention to temporality diverges from the conventions that structured much of 20th-century landscape photography, which gradually moved from idealized depictions toward more dynamic, human-inflected interpretations. Markowicz engages this trajectory but reconfigures it by embedding temporal experience directly into the photographic process itself.

This reorientation toward temporality invites a reconsideration of the broader history of landscape photography and the aesthetic values that shaped it. Early modernist photographers such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston emphasized technical mastery, precision, and formal composition. Working with large-format cameras, they presented landscapes as timeless, idealized scenes that celebrated the permanence of natural forms. In their pursuit of clarity and harmonic composition, temporality was subordinated to visual perfection.

By the mid-20th century, photographers such as Minor White and Paul Strand began to explore the landscape as a dynamic, perceptual experience. White’s use of abstraction and poetic framing and Strand’s attention to the patterns of light and form introduced a deeper awareness of temporality and sensory engagement. Their work acknowledged that our understanding of the landscape is shaped by time and change, rather than by static idealization.

This shift continued into the 1970s with the New Topographics movement, which reoriented landscape photography toward human-altered environments and the subtle temporal rhythms of industrial and suburban spaces. Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Lewis Baltz adopted an observational style that emphasized continuity and gradual transformation over immediate visual drama. Markowicz builds on these earlier explorations of temporality but approaches it more directly and immersively. Whereas photographers associated with the New Topographics movement documented the slow evolution of human-altered environments, Markowicz integrates temporal experience into the photographic process itself.

Against this background, contemporary large-format photographers such as Edward Burtynsky and Andreas Gursky offer a contrasting scale and orientation. Their work emphasizes structural and systemic forces — industrial extraction, global circulation, infrastructural transformation. Markowicz, by contrast, centres the phenomenological experience of seeing. His images register the transience of light and weather rather than the permanence of industrial form, positioning landscape as a temporal event rather than a monumental object.

This emphasis aligns closely with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s conception of perception as a continuous, temporally unfolding experience. We do not encounter the world as a series of discrete instants but as an ongoing flow in which vision, movement, and environment remain inseparable. Markowicz’s long exposures give this idea concrete form. They are aggregates of perception shaped by shifting light and evolving weather conditions. Temporal gradients replace fixed contours, revealing the landscape as something lived through duration rather than apprehended at once.

The Alpine setting heightens this phenomenological dimension. Tyrol and Vorarlberg — regions marked by volatile weather — provide conditions in which shifting light and atmospheric change become essential to the images. As weather moves across the mountains, the long exposures register these transformations, recasting a landscape traditionally associated with permanence as dynamic and temporal. The Alps emerge as participants in unfolding processes of light and duration, aligning their grandeur with broader natural cycles.

Markowicz’s use of the camera obscura further articulates this dynamic understanding of landscape. Since the apparatus remains in motion during the exposure, the fixed, monocular viewpoint traditionally associated with landscape photography is quietly undone. The photograph becomes not a single optical extraction but an extended negotiation between movement, light, and time. The mechanism of the camera thus echoes the phenomenological concerns at play: vision emerges as a lived duration, inseparable from the conditions through which it unfolds.

The images bear the trace of this durational process in their softened horizons, shifting contours, and painterly atmospheric effects. These qualities do not obscure the landscape but reveal it as something that forms gradually, through overlapping states rather than discrete moments. The viewer must inhabit this temporality as well. What initially appears abstract slowly coalesces into recognizable terrain, prompting a mode of looking that mirrors the unfolding conditions under which the photographs were made. Duration becomes both the method and the content of the work.

At a moment when many approaches lean toward spectacle, technological mastery, or environmental alarm, his work proposes a more contemplative mode grounded in the phenomenology of perception. By merging a centuries-old optical device with the fluidity of moving exposure and the volatile atmospherics of the Alps, he offers an alternative vocabulary for depicting the natural world — one that privileges process over instantaneity, becoming over monumentality. These images do not freeze the landscape; they invite the viewer to witness its continual emergence.

Taken together, Markowicz’s long-exposure landscapes challenge the persistence of viewing the natural world as fixed or singular. Instead, they reveal the environment as an ongoing event — shaped by time, weather, movement, and the embodied act of seeing. In translating these conditions into a visual language of gradients, dissolutions, and evolving forms, the photographs make perceptible what usually remains implicit in experience: that perception itself is temporal. The work reframes landscape not as a static subject to be captured but as a lived relation to the world — one that unfolds, shifts, and renews itself with each moment of looking.

What were your first encounters with art in your childhood and youth?

I grew up in the eighties in Nowy Sącz, southern Poland — a small town with one theatre and one library. My grandmother called me ‘pędziwiatr,’ a roadrunner, always gone with the wind. Art came to me first through the cinema. I watched Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera as a teenager, mesmerized by how he captured motion and time on film. Later I discovered Rothko’s color fields in a book — those hovering rectangles felt like windows into time itself.

When I was young, a sudden illness nearly took my life. Many doctors gave up, but one didn’t. That experience made me obsessed with time’s passage. I’m here now, but I might not be tomorrow. That awareness awakened rather than limited me.

My father kept a Zenit camera hidden in his drawer. He forbade us to touch it. But I was the roadrunner, and curiosity won. I used it secretly during his long work hours, knowing nothing about photography — just fascinated by catching moments happening before my eyes. After a year, my photographs appeared on charity postcards. When my father discovered this, he was upset, then understanding. He gave me the camera.

When did photography emerge as a central means of your artistic expression?

For twenty years I searched. I tried drawing and painting first — I was not patient enough. I made video installations — they felt technically overbearing. I experimented with photograms, calotypes, pinhole cameras. Everything felt partial. I knew I wanted to express time’s passing, light’s power, and memory of place simultaneously, but couldn’t find how.

The basement darkroom was my true education — touch, chemistry, waiting in darkness for images to appear. When digital photography arrived in the late 1990s, that tactile relationship vanished. I felt unmoored. In 2007, I returned to camera obscura, building stationary versions in empty rooms. As fascinating as they were, I felt something was still missing.

The revelation came in 2012 in New York. Riding the subway through a tunnel, the train lights went off. External light flickered through windows — and suddenly I understood: motion is time made visible. I needed to set the camera obscura in motion.

I spent the next three years converting a van. I learned to work in complete darkness, how to drive the moving camera while making photographs. I solved light-leak problems. I tested papers and exposure times. Dozens of failures before the first successful image. After all these years I’d finally found my method — not just a technique, but my way of being in the world.

In contrast to standard photographic practice, in which the recording process is delegated to constantly improving camera technology, you take the opposite approach. You use the early, now primitive technology of the camera obscura and convert a car or a ship into mobile cameras in which the paper is exposed directly. You live in the camera during your projects. The sensual process of image creation seems to be at least as important to you as the image that will result.

They’re inseparable. The process is the artwork.

Inside, I work in complete darkness, cutting paper by touch, hanging it by memory. After hundreds of exposures, my hands know the space absolutely. I count eight seconds — not seven, not nine — because eight seconds is my personal portal to staying present.

The dominant light in these images, the light that paints the sky and the river, traveled eight minutes from the Sun to reach us. During the eight seconds of exposure, I collaborate with that cosmic light, recording its path directly onto photographic paper. No sensor, no algorithm intervenes. Just silver halide crystals responding to photons — pure chemistry and physics.

Your camera obscura confuses our viewing habits. It is not capable of producing sharp images, and you reinforce this apparent shortcoming by moving your mobile cameras during exposure. A balancing act between documentary and painting?

I call them ‘Motiongraphs’ — records of time collaborating with light in motion of life.

The blur isn’t aesthetic choice or technical failure. It’s the truth. We think we see the world sharply, frozen in clear moments, but that’s an illusion. Our perception is continuous flow. The Motiongraph reveals what we actually experience that gets lost in our snapshot way of seeing.

The colors are inverted because I expose directly onto chromogenic paper without creating a positive. What appears orange was blue. What appears magenta was green. I present these negatives as final works because they show how light truly writes itself in chemistry. To convert them to positives would be to ‘correct’ light’s own handwriting.

Documentary captures what was there. Painting interprets what was felt. Motiongraphs record how time flowed through a place while I was present to witness it. They’re not about something — they are something. A duration made tangible.

The comeback of traditional techniques is often a reaction to the digitalisation of our everyday lives. Do you have any objections to works like this being seen as satisfying sentimental, nostalgic needs?

I’m not retreating into the past. I’m using the oldest optical principle to confront the most urgent condition of the present: our collective addiction to instancy.

If anything feels nostalgic, let it be a productive nostalgia: a reminder that we have lost the ability to live in durée. In Matter and Memory, Bergson argues that our perception is inherently durational — we never perceive isolated instants, only the continuous flow of past into present, what he calls the ‘interpenetration’ of memory and sensation. My eight-second exposures function as small Bergsonian experiments. The photographic paper accumulates light the way memory accumulates experience — not as discrete snapshots but as layered duration. The blur isn’t technical failure; it’s visual evidence of that interpenetration.

Each Motiongraph is a modest invitation to step back into that flow — bodily, attentively — for the length of one conscious breath. I don’t mind if someone calls it nostalgic, as long as they leave the gallery a few good seconds slower than when they arrived.

The invitation to INN SITU means engaging with the Tyrol/Vorarlberg region. How did you come up with your theme?

Through research, conversations, and extended location scouting trips — it wasn’t only mystical emergence; experience guided me.

I’d been thinking that the earliest photographers — Niépce, Daguerre, Talbot — understood photography as collaboration with light requiring patience. Exposures lasted minutes, even hours. Somewhere we forgot that origin, became obsessed with instant capture. The Alpine landscape seemed perfect for returning to photography’s original temporal relationship with light.

Mountains rising dramatically from river valleys create this visceral sense of suspension between earth and sky. That spatial condition mirrors the temporal suspension I experience inside camera obscura. Above the river, under the sky — that’s where the work lives.

Your earlier New York works already featured river images. The bridge is a frequently chosen motif, yet usually invisible in your pictures.

The bridge is my threshold — literally and metaphorically. Bridges disappear during crossing. You’re not looking at the bridge structure — you’re looking at what it reveals, what it connects. It becomes a way of seeing rather than object seen.

In Austria, this metaphor deepens. Alpine bridges span not merely rivers but valleys — sometimes hundreds of meters of empty space. What began as a literal vantage position becomes conceptual framework: my practice is itself a bridge between presence and perception, between moment and memory, between seeing and making visible.

There are several movements in your river pictures: the technical movement of the camera, the natural movement of the flowing water, and the personal, biographical movement of you travelling through the landscape.

These movements are inseparable — like voices in polyphonic music.

There’s the Camera Obscura’s physical movement during the eight-second exposure. There’s water’s movement from Alpine sources to the Danube. And there’s my biographical movement: growing up in Poland, emigrating at twenty-one, studying photography at London’s University of Arts, that transformative period in New York developing the mobile camera obscura.

The paradox of the roadrunner who stopped running, yet who never stopped moving. But now movement is deliberate, attentive. Not escape — exploration.

How important is it for you to meet the people who recommend a motif to you, show you the way to a location, and share their relationship to a river or a bridge?

These encounters are essential — they ground the work in lived experience beyond my own. When someone shares their memories, they give me knowledge that no map can provide.

In Tyrol, while following the Lech River, I got lost and ended up at a farmhouse. The owner greeted me with Dzień dobry. After a Polish/Bavarian lunch made by his Polish cook, he took me on his quad through the valley, showing me bridges I could photograph. Their knowledge enriches my temporal practice.

What lines of development do you see for your work in the near future?

I will continue to practise the art of presence in an age of distraction.

My subject remains time itself — specifically, how to make visible the lived duration that Bergson described as durée. I’m exploring how light behaves in water where it moves slower than in air. I’m in conversation with atmospheric scientists about meteorological balloons carrying camera obscura into the stratosphere, where light is unfiltered by troposphere. Last year I began a lifelong project titled Full Moon Shadows — monthly photograms exposed to moonlight. Each full moon at midnight, I place photographic paper outdoors for eight seconds. Objects in the landscape register as silhouettes. The series maps my locations across lunar cycles: a year of presence documented through celestial rather than solar light.

The 200th anniversary context has sharpened my thinking: what will photography mean in its third century? In an age of AI-generated images and infinite digital reproduction, handmade unique objects created through direct light collaboration gain significance precisely because they cannot be duplicated. Each Motiongraph is unique not through artificial scarcity but ontological fact — time never flows identically twice.

My Camera Obscura keeps moving because life keeps flowing. I simply continue being — present.