The Polish Photographer Kacper Kowalski

The Polish Photographer from Gdynia – Shooting from a Gyroplane

Kacper Kowalski is a photographer – but not an ordinary one. When he presses the shutter, he is hovering in a gyroplane above the forests, fields and industrial landscapes of his home country Poland. From this extraordinary bird's-eye view, he creates images that are barely decipherable at first glance: mysterious compositions somewhere between documentary and abstract art.

Kowalski originally intended to become an architect. He studied architecture at the Gdańsk University of Technology and worked in the profession for four years – until flying and photography took complete hold of him. Since then he has combined the two: he flies to places where people are not supposed to be – forgotten industrial sites, contaminated landscapes, locations that remain invisible from the ground.

His photographs are portraits of civilisation, as he himself puts it. And they are a critique: for his series Toxic Beauty, which documents various forms of environmental pollution from the air, he was awarded the World Press Photo Award in the Nature Story category in 2014 – following a first award in 2009.

Film Production for Deutsche Welle TV | euromaxx

The camera team from Basiliscus Film travelled to Gdynia in January 2015 for two days of shooting, around 30 kilometres west of Gdańsk. Author and director Stephanie Drescher developed the concept for the euromaxx programme – Life and Culture in Europe – in collaboration with Deutsche Welle and oversaw the entire production on location.

We documented Kacper Kowalski in his flat and in his studio, where he reviews, edits and selects his images – a quiet contrast to the dramatic aerial sequences. We then drove with him to the Kashubia region, one of his favourite backdrops. We filmed the pre-flight preparations on the ground, the take-off into the winter sky, and the photographer in his element – camera in hand, gyroplane in the wind. Unfortunately, our cameraman Uwe Schwarze was not able to join him in the air: the weather was simply too poor.

The finished portrait shows not only the spectacular aerial photographs, but also the person behind them: his working method, his dependence on the weather, his fascination with the intersections between humanity and nature. The scheduled broadcast date was 15 January 2015.