Piotr Jaxa

Piotr Jaxa, SCS, is a cinematographer and photographer who was born in Poland and who has been living in Switzerland since 1982. He graduated from the Polish National Film School in Lodz and has worked as Director of Photography on a range of fictional and documentary films worldwide (his work has been shown at festivals such as Cannes, Mannheim, Krakow, Los Angeles and Berlin). For the last few years, Piotr Jaxa has been extensively exploring the creative possibilities of digital cinematography in independent European productions for the cinema ("Going Private" by Stina Werenfels, "Hello Goodbye" by Stefan Jaeger, "Rocksteady: The Roots of Reggae" by Stascha Bader, "The War Is Over" by Mitko Panov), combining his profound experience of the 35 mm film camera with a passion for the new aesthetic possibilities offered by digital technology. Acknowleding his contributions to this field, he was awarded the Lohn-Ammannsegg Prize in 2009 for exquisite camera work and was invited to join the Swiss Film Academy. He has also given numerous seminars on the subject at places such as FOCAL, ZHdK (Zurich), HEAD (Geneva), CEPV (Vevey) etc. Simultaneously he has been active as a freelance photographer, specializing in film-stills and editorial photography that have been published in various media in Europe, USA and Japan. Following his photographic collaboration with Krzysztof Kieslowski on the set of the film trilogy "Blue", "White" and "Red", he prepared an exhibition entitled "Remembering Krzysztof" which has been touring the world since 1994. He is also the author of a series of photographic books: "L'esprit de Geneve" (1988), "Oh! Barcelone" (1992) and "Poschiavo, un mondo di valle" (1998). Since 1995, Piotr Jaxa has been working on a new book and exhibition project entitled "Cinematographers" - a collection of portraits of directors of photography from around the world. So far 115 artists (from 24 countries and 4 continents) have sat for their portraits.