On Music

On music, photography and singing back up for Horse.

This afternoon I was walking home with En Vogue on shuffle in my AirPods. It was a beautiful spring day, the sun was out and for a moment I stopped, took a deep breath, smiled and thought about how much I absolutely love music with every cell in my body and how it makes everything better. I also thought about how music probably saved my life.

I know it sounds a tad dramatic but bear with me. I came of age in Poland at a very specific and strange moment - the early 1990s, the liminal space between the end of Communism and the beginning of whatever came next. Poland was then, and remains so to an extent, a deeply conservative country shaped by the Catholic Church and a troubled history, and I was a kid who was visibly different in ways that drew attention I didn't want. My chunky blue walkman was protection. Blasting music loud enough to drown out the homophobic abuse that was being shouted at me in the street was as much a survival strategy as it was music enjoyment.

One of my earliest memories is waking up to the radio my parents would have on in our one bedroom apartment, and music has been a constant in my life ever since. I went to music school around the age of ten. I'd set my heart on the piano only to be told I was too old to start. With piano, you needed to begin at five or six in those days apparently. Begrudgingly I chose the guitar instead, imagining I'd be learning songs around a campfire. Instead I got scales to practice. I lasted a year.

Yup, that’s me!

Ironically, I actually learned to play the guitar a few years later at a summer camp, when someone sat down with me, showed me four basic chords and taught me how to play the Polish version of Paul Anka's Diana. That was it. That was the education. Everything the music school couldn't give me in a year, four chords on a summer afternoon sorted out. Somewhere in between the scales and summer camps, I would also sing at school functions.

“Venus” by Shocking Blue was one of the tracks performed here. Shout out to my backing singers!

So I sang, I played, I wrote songs. In the late 2000s I released a self-produced electro-pop EP under the name Fresko - copies of which I'm fairly sure still exist somewhere. What I came to understand with time however, was not so much that I wasn't talented enough (though I don’t think I was) but more that I didn't have the particular kind of drive and ambition that the music industry requires. And having spent the last 16 years years photographing people who do have that - who have given everything to music, who have built their lives around it - I've come to feel genuinely lucky that I get to dip in my toe in the music business as a photographer rather than a full time musician. This industry is brutal in ways that aren't always visible from the outside.

The reason I'm telling you all of this, is that most people who know my work, know me primarily as a photographer of musicians and artists. It's the thread that runs through everything - the album covers, the decade-long collaborations, the festival stages, the recording studios. I also truly am a total music nerd. While I struggle with rudimentary maths and can barely recall what I had for lunch the day before, music trivia lives in my brain rent-free and at the drop of a hat I will happily tell you what was, say, Stevie Wonder's first number one and who played drums on it (Fingertips pt. 2 and Marvin Gaye, respectively).

Admittedly, that kind of knowledge is completely useless on a day to day basis, but it comes in handy when you get to work with other music geeks, which artists I photograph often tend to be. There's a shared language that doesn't need to be explained. And I understand what it feels like to want to create something, I know what it costs. I also create custom playlists for my shoots: music in the room isn't background noise to me - it sets the atmosphere, relaxes the subject, provides a point of conversation (do you know who played drums on this? 😉) and keeps me in the right headspace too.

A couple of years ago, while I was taking candid shots during recording sessions for Horse's album The Road Less Travelled, she told me to get in the vocal booth (there’s a slight possibility I may have been dropping hints about wanting to do backing vocals for some time…). I ended up on a track called Superpower. My name is in the credits. Not a bad outcome for someone who quit music school after a year of scales, right?

with Lorny Thomas and Chris Judge recording backing vocals for Horse.