Untitled (early stages of Darling Harbour re-development)

Steven Lojewski grew up in Canada and moved to Australia in 1969. He studied photography at Prahran College of Advanced Education and then at Sydney College of the Arts in the 1970s. He began lecturing at Sydney College in 1978. Lojewski’s early black and white work concentrated on aspects of urban architecture but by the mid 1980s this interest had become more that of an archaeologist. Lojewski began to focus on the fine details of urban detritus and the industrial. His large body of work for the CSR photography project presents claustrophobic interiors where the meaning of the machinery and spaces is lost.

Lojewski’s Darling Harbour photographs present the soon to be developed site as similarly lacking in scale though his shots are taken from above and it is clear that they are out of doors. Lojewski revels in the remarkable detail of such a disregarded environment by using a large format camera which produces 6 x 9 cm negatives and the viewer is free to roam over the detail of odd structures and piles of dirt – all flattened by the birds eye view.

In 1991 Lojewski wrote: ‘I see my work acting as a type of archaeological tomb of information and knowledge to be used in the future as evidence of the times and places in which I photograph…. My interest in the urban landscape is not just a matter of dealing with visual issues but to recognise social and human processes.’1

1. Lojewski, S. 1991, 'Outline of photographic documentation of the Newcastle and Wollongong areas of NSW', Australia, unpub. mss. artist files, AGNSW

© Art Gallery of New South Wales Photography Collection Handbook, 2007