Let's Talk about Life & Death Darling

  • Piotr Karpinski
  • Studio 1854
“The people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned”.
Matthew 4:16 Isaiah 9:1,2
When working on the 1st picture of “Let’s Talk about Life & Death Darling” I had Ingmar Bergman, one of my masters, in mind. Watching his “Seventh Seal” was a primary inspiration and a starting point of bringing this series to life. How to picture Death? Bergman’s way of doing that pushed me to search for my own response. It started as a fiction fed on my fascinations and fears. The project developed from fiction towards photographing the darker part of reality around me when Death knocked on the doors of my own home. Death stepped into my fictional stories and ruled the last two pictures of the series and opened chapter 3 “Post Mortem Home Visists”. 5 works are titled “Woman in the Church No.1”with numbers 0-4.
Shot in churches on a medium format 6x7“ film camera.
My work is about Life and Death. What is always behind the image is a thought. Thoughts behind my photographs are my fascinations, fears and concerns related to existence and its ending. I use photography to record these. I am interested in Memento mori theme in visual art. Thinking of Time and its destructive powers is what drives my practice and shapes my ideas. I explore the notions of “never”, “forever” and “always”. Those matters are complicated and beyond our full understanding. I barely know any answers myself. I feel more comfortable asking questions rather than giving answers when photographing.


Piotr Karpinski's project has been awarded with the Breakthrough Award 2016 from the British Journal of Photography and selected for The Photography Annual 2015 by The Creative Review Magazine, Magnum Swap Shop by Magnum Photos; Magnum Photos 70 with David Hurn & Martin Parr and International Print Exhibition 159 by The Royal Photographic Society to name some. /piotr's web