For many months we asked photographers to send us a piece of audio no longer than five minutes in length to include on our A Photographic Life podcast. These became a book which is now out of print but remain in audio form within the podcast archive, available wherever you get your podcasts . However, we are responding to listener requests and offering transcriptions of some of our favourite contributions. Enjoy!

Born in 1956, Witold Krassowski studied linguistics at the University of Warsaw and the Sorbonne, and received his doctorate and post-doctoral degree in photography at the Radio and Television Faculty of the University of Silesia. After receiving his final diploma, photography became his career. He moved to London in 1988, where he became involved with the Independent Magazine, and joined the Network Photographers agency. Krassowski has worked in Afghanistan, the UK, Mongolia, and India, but most of his creative output comes from Poland. His work has been published in various titles including Liberation, Stern, Der Spiegel, The Observer, and The New Yorker, among others. He was the recipient of the World Press Photo Award in 1991 and 2003. Since 2009, he has published four books including After Images of Poland and exhibited at the The Photographers Gallery, London; Noorderlicht Photofestival, Holland and Perpignan Photo Festival, France. He teaches in the Faculty of Media Art at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. 

“It is not easy to say what photography means to me. I would rather consider that, at different periods of my life, it has meant different things. At the beginning it was adventure, it was mystery because I couldn’t figure out how a picture should be taken and what makes it interesting. Then, with experience, came the second stage when one is sure that pictures will be presentable. At that time, I think photography became for me a passport to the world, a tool for learning. I remember that my ambition was to create a coherent image of human life regardless of cultural and nationalistic differences. A summation of reality on the biological level. With the changes in the photography market, I realised that short stories didn’t work anymore. You needed to produce longer stories, a body of work. A body of work needs a different thought process and I started reflecting on the
photographic image as a communication tool. Ultimately, I believe that photography is nothing more than a technology, a technology that produces
images, but the photographic image is a different technology, it’s a technology to influence people. For me, it is also a technology to ambush reality or rather to ambush peoples belief concerning reality. As such, photography is a manipulation tool but once you enter the field of manipulation you have to know why you have done this.

Today I believe that the photographic image is definitely a manipulation, that may be used to destroy social links or to strengthen them. Personally, I am interested in life where there is no consumption, which makes it extremely difficult for me to work, as everything around us is based on consumption. I try to produce portraits and I believe that, after a while, it is simply boring. It leads you nowhere, you can add another ten, another twenty, but it doesn’t offer any photographic personal challenge for me. The photographers are the manipulators; if they are lucky they manipulate in their own name, if they are not, they manipulate in the name of the client. There is a lot of misunderstanding about which images work, but this is an entirely different piece of cake.” 

http://www.witoldkrassowski.com