Winter Jam is the little sister to Warsaw CI Flow, the international contact improvisation festival organized by the Perform Foundation with support from the City of Warsaw. Like Flow, Winter Jam is held at the Mazowiecki Instytut Kultury and delivers a rich program of movement classes and labs with jams, many of which feature live music. Unlike Flow, which usually goes on for a week and offers a three-way split of concurrent intensives, Winter Jam is just three days long and comparatively more local and far more cozy. The photos I’m sharing are a selection of the ones I took this year, as the third edition of Winter Jam unfolded and the city around us filled up with snow.
For photos from last year’s Winter Jam and a longer essay, see this post from February ’24.
All photos by the author, taken on 02/13, 02/14, and 02/15 with the Fujifilm XT-5 and mainly the Fujinon 56mm f/1.2 portrait prime. All have direct or implied consent from the organizers and the teachers, musicians, and participants featured in the images. (But hey if you change your mind and want something deleted, just let me know.)
I want to thank Marta Wojtas especially for helping me come up with a way to neatly include a photo of me in the festival archive. (Marta, as so many do, offered to take my picture. I declined, both for authorship management reasons and because I prefer not to let others handle my camera. But one thing led to another and soon Marta and I were in front of a mirror and improvising a way to let me borrow her eye, which suited my workflow, felt exhilarating, and produced two photos I love.)