Untitled, Roof top machinery

Steven Lojewski uses his camera to isolate and record overlooked moments in the built environment. Through his photographic practice, he adopts the role of the archaeologist, a metaphoric association he proposed in 1991. To this end, his photographs make visible the traces of human life that can be found in the urban landscape.

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, where he began lecturing in 1978. Lojewski’s early black and white photographs reveal a strong concern with the spatial ambiguity of the photographic plane and its ability to reorient perception. Whether they isolate singular details or bury them completely within dynamic and layered compositions, Lojewski’s photographs present new perspectives on the built environment.

Lojewski produced a large body of work documenting the Pyrmont sugar refinery for the CSR photography project, an initiative of the Colonial Sugar Refinery to support photography as a visual art in Australia in the early 1980s. The CSR commissioned Australian photographers to document the range of their industrial operations in Australia. Lojewski’s tight compositions present chaotic industrial scenes that are dominated by machinery. In these photographs, the distinction between machinery, space and the occasional person is lost. Instead, we are confronted with a single complex form where stark geometric structures are revealed in the interplay between light and shadow.