Max Miechowski: Border force
London-based photographer Max Miechowski mixes long-form projects such as Burgess Park and the book and exhibition Land Loss, which explore relationships between people and place, with commercial and editorial work. Here, he talks to Tim Cumming about working within defined parameters, learning to expand those boundaries, his output and its preoccupations.
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What was your way in to becoming a photographer?
I was completely focused on music from the age of 15 to 25, and first picked up a camera because I wanted to make music videos, but a friend got me into urban exploration photography. That’s what really flipped a switch for me. I fell completely in love with it. I started a degree in Leeds then left after a year because I wanted to get to London and start working properly. I’ve been here ever since.
Who are your mentors and influences?
Some of my closest friends are photographers whose work I really respect, and we have an open, honest dialogue about our practices that I find invaluable. In terms of influences, music shaped how I think about creativity and expression in ways that are still present in my work.
Music shaped how I think about creativity and expression in ways that are still present in my work.
Recently I’ve been inspired by cinema and moving image, and by fiction. I’ve been struck by what fiction can do, how it gets to aspects of human experience that are otherwise very hard to communicate. That’s something I’m trying to find in my own images.
Above: Ticket Booth, from Miechowski's series A Big Fat Sky.
What was your breakthrough?
A series called Burgess Park, my local park in southeast London, when I first moved to the city. I’d been making street portraits around the area and when I started working in the park, I realised that creating a tight geographical parameter allowed the images to open up and contain something deeper.
Do you prefer to work in series?
Working within a defined parameter - geographical, conceptual or whatever - is how I find the most interesting work. You arrive with certain expectations of what a project might look like, and often what emerges is completely different and more surprising than anything you’d planned.
Are there key themes that drive you?
The most interesting things tend to arrive unexpectedly. Land Loss started as a document of the eroding British coastline. I knew it would carry certain undertones of deep time and impermanence, but it was only about a year after the book came out that I realised how much of it was about home. About the need for security, for an anchor, for somewhere that feels permanent even when you know it isn’t. Those were themes I hadn’t consciously set out to explore, but they were clearly there.
The most interesting things tend to arrive unexpectedly.
They keep shifting. Things that excited me three or four years ago don’t necessarily excite me now. What’s live for me at the moment is moving image, and how that can be incorporated into the work I’m making. It feels like genuinely new territory and that’s exciting. But the consistent thread is this drive to get the work closer to a certain atmosphere or feeling that communicates something of how I see the world. And for that to resonate with people.
Above: A fossil hunter from the series Moroccan Fossil Trade.
How do you set about exploring them with a camera?
It always comes back to finding the right parameter, usually a place, and then committing to it. Returning, revisiting, remaking. The themes reveal themselves through that process.
Is photography for you more poetry or documentary?
It has to be of the world, made in the real world, from real moments. But within that I’m always pushing at the edges. Colour, abstraction, silhouette, light: these start to move the work towards something that feels more like poetry.
The most interesting space is somewhere between documentary and fiction, between record and poem.
The most interesting space is somewhere between documentary and fiction, between record and poem. That’s where I feel closest to a deeper kind of truth.
What equipment do you use?
When I discovered analogue I fell completely in love with it. The slowness, the process, the delayed gratification of getting film back. But gradually I became drawn to what digital gave me: freedom. The ability to move quickly, experiment, push at the edges of a moment without having to pre-visualise everything. For the past three or four years my practice has been entirely digital.
Above: Another image from Moroccan Fossil Trade.
Have you shot much commercial work?
I’ve shot a lot of editorial and commercial. The interesting thing is how much commercial and editorial work feeds into personal practice. It’s also what keeps everything else alive. The personal work, the long-form projects, they need the commercial work to exist.
What’s your reaction to being chosen by Peter Thwaites as an Innovator?
I have a lot of respect for Peter’s work, so to find out he’s been connecting with mine felt genuinely honourable. What I love about something like this is the idea that people working across completely different mediums can look at each other’s work and find something in it.
What are your ambitions and next goals for your work?
They keep shifting. Things that excited me three or four years ago don’t necessarily excite me now. What’s live for me at the moment is moving image, and how that can be incorporated into the work I’m making.
Things that excited me three or four years ago don’t necessarily excite me now.
It feels like genuinely new territory and that’s exciting. But the consistent thread is this drive to get the work closer to a certain atmosphere or feeling that communicates something of how I see the world. And for that to resonate with people.
All of the Icons & Innovator interviews can be found in this year's shots magazine Cannes special.
