Pictures [Author Favorites]
Here are the highlights from this year’s Winter Jam in Warsaw, Poland.
I shot these using my new X-T5 Fujifilm body—a formidable mirrorless that can do much, much more than I know how to do. And I paired it with my favorite lens—the dreamy but versatile Fujinon 56mm f/1.2 portrait prime, a perfect match for the body adance and for people exploring connection.
For many more photos, scroll all the way down.
Words
This year’s Winter Jam was the second edition of a festival that came into being last year as Warsaw Flow’s little sister. Winter Jam is shorter and smaller than Flow, with sixty participants instead of a hundred. This of course makes the event more intimate, but since the group does not separate for concurrent sessions, the intimacy belongs to a sizeable crowd in steady osmosis over three whole days and evenings. And the activities are mostly not classes but jams, each facilitated by a different teacher and focused in its own special way. Like Flow, Winter Jam is organized by the Perform Foundation with frequent support from the City of Warsaw and it is held at the Mazowiecki Instytut Kultury in Warsaw’s Elektoralna near Plac Bankowy. I can’t imagine a more beautiful and welcoming venue for this sort of thing.
My plan this year was to participate fully and take pictures sometimes, without making the photographer’s role my priority. But it turned out—not for the first time—that the camera connects me to what’s going on more than it separates me. And reaching for it comes as naturally to me as napping does to some in my cohort. Why is that? Well, my long-range vision is not very good, so I like the way the camera does the seeing (and focusing) for me, then lets me study the details later on. And I love the way a photo is just a slice of the story, one that crops out chaos, clutter, and all those other agents of “too much” I frequently wish I could silence.
I experience the state of inspired immersion known as “flow” increasingly often in my life—when writing for clients, when writing my own stuff, when cooking and cleaning if I time it right, when sewing, when editing photographs. I used to find photo shoots too tech-heavy, however, and often too socially demanding to afford me the same kind of effortless attention. This, I’m discovering, has changed. It’s as if I’ve shaken away my sense of minding how others are, danced off the feeling of not belonging. Sometimes, I don’t even view what I’m doing as my doing. Instead, it’s as if life itself were casting me in a role it has fully prepared me to play.
Some of us were sad when it was time to part early Sunday evening. Not me. I was about to relive the whole thing in the quiet of my process. I find photo selection and editing to be just as creative as the photo shoot, only here there’s no rush, no distraction, no pressure. Now I can freeze time whenever I want, zoom in with my super-sight, try things and fail, start over, transform perspective. One part might be done, but the storytelling is only beginning.
On Tuesday morning, about midway through my editing I got an email of great significance. It was from the organizers of an upcoming festival in Cologne, to which I had applied for the photo spot late last year. The guy they had chosen just canceled, do I want the gig? This was not just great news, but also synchronicity at its peak: not only do I want the gig, but I’ve just confirmed that I can handle the gig—and be immersed in a festival while I’m at it.
Next, two things happened. One—I shared my Winter Jam photos with the people in them and I began work on this post. Two—I updated my website to give more prominence to photography. (Previously I had figured all those photos on my blog spoke for themselves, so my focus was on promoting brand naming and strategic writing to business clients. But now that events are so emphatically putting photography at the center of my interests and plans, I’m ready to embody the “yes, and” nature of a career that deals in both pictures and words.)
When people ask how I enjoyed Winter Jam I say that it felt safe and exciting at the same time, familiar and new. Not only did I enjoy myself and deepen my relationships, but I also had a completely transformative creative experience. And my sense is that ending the festival with a three-hour Underscore—the holy mass of CI jams—was an especially enlightened bit of planning.
Pictures [Fifty of Them]
Here I present nearly half of the one hundred and twenty photos I have kept—out of over five hundred images shot. In spite of my mother’s sensible advice to break up this glut into palatable sub-sections, I’m embracing the long form, even if it means my audience is limited to people who attended the festival and those who are considering me for event photography. (In fact, this far down that’s precisely my audience.)
The photos I’ve chosen are in somewhat non-chronological order, the better to tell a story that’s only partly tethered to time. I’ve gone with a high-contrast black-and-white look that sets off the mood and the space while conveniently easing post-production on so many underexposed images with high ISO.
None of the participants declined to be photographed and no images were deleted as this body of work was in review mode. I’m glad I managed to get so many of us in the frame, though I’ll strive to get everyone next time (plus a reasonable selfie and a structured group photo). And I realize I forgot to memorialize all those paper cups we had so individualistically signed, as well as the heaps of fruit, nuts, and chocolate that kept us sustained. I’ll remember these omissions next time, and likely miss some new stuff to learn from after that.
The previews are all cropped to landscape format, but many of the photos have a vertical aspect ratio. If you open the gallery in lightbox view you will see the full frames. As to zooming in, I don’t know how to make that possible using the Wells template on Squarespace. If you do, let me know.
All photos and writing by Natalia Osiatynska, 2024. Posted with permission from (and my thanks to) the event’s participants, organizers, and hosts.