Jorge Lewinski was born in Lwów, Poland in 1921 and arrived in England with the Polish army to train with the Royal Airforce in 1942. He subsequently studied economics at London University and turned to photography, initially as an amateur, in the postwar period, counting fellow emigre photographer Bill Brandt, as a close friend. Establishing his practice during the 1960s, Lewinski is best known for his photographic portraits of artists in their studios, for teaching and writing about photography, and for establishing photography as an accredited degree subject.
Photographer Jorge Lewinski was born in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine) on 25 March 1921. His grandfather was a distinguished architect and town planner, and his father a writer and linguist. He was brought up by his maternal grandmother until he attended school in Warsaw, leaving in 1939. Following his mother’s death and the outbreak of war, Lewinski’s dream of entering film school was dispelled. After surviving Russian occupation and internment in a forced labour camp in Siberia, Lewinski was drafted into the Polish 'Anders' army, with whom he served with the Allied forces in the Middle East, and in 1942 was sent to train with the Royal Air Force in England, where he chose to settle permanently. Lewinski stayed because of his love for English culture: ‘He loved London cinemas, which he remembered fondly from the blackout. He became friends with the great photographer Bill Brandt, whose images caught the London blitz, and he joined a local camera club’ (Hopkinson, 2008). Lewinski initially studied economics at London University where he met his first wife, a Polish survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, and with whom he had two sons in the 1950s. He only started to practice photography as an amateur, and he was introduced to forming an art collection by exchanging a few of his photographs for a painting by Feilks Topolski, a fellow Pole in London. Establishing a name and a particular photographic practice, Lewinski mostly photographed artists in their studio, looking ‘to photograph the artist, not the person’ (Hopkinson, 2008).
By 1966, after accumulating photographic portraits of Frank Auerbach, Marcel Duchamp and Graham Sutherland, Lewinski was able to successfully establish his position as photographer of artists, and from then on he practiced professionally. Lewinski subsequently photographed Henry Moore and Gerald Scarfe in 1967, Barbara Hepworth in 1968 and David Hockney in 1969. The same year, he produced a double-exposed portrait of Francis Bacon at his studio, 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington. With its multiple viewpoint and distorted features, the photograph resembles one of Bacon’s own painted portraits. Later, in 1970, Lewinski photographed Bacon at his studio again, in one image pausing midway up the stairs to take his picture: ‘Lewinski looks heavenward, his gaze met by Bacon’s shadowy poker-face. The artist is raised up, venerated. The composition of this photograph appears indebted to the myth of the ‘Artist-God’. It shows Bacon as the artist-genius, guarding the entry to his studio where the paintings that bear his name are putatively manufactured’ (Chare, 2013). In addition to portraits, Lewinski became known for his landscape photographs, and both were exhibited in solo shows at The Royal Photographic Society in 1964 and the National Portrait Gallery in 1972.
In addition to his burgeoning photography practice, Lewinski began teaching and writing about photography in this period. He was Senior Lecturer at the London College of Printing from 1968 to 1982, where he helped to establish the College’s first photography degrees. Between 1976 and 1987 he wrote and co-authored several books. The Camera at War: War Photography from 1848 to the Present Day, published in 1978, has since been influential on the scholarship of war photography. Lewinski was also a prolific contributor of articles to Amateur Photographer, Good Photography and other magazines, ‘some of them pegged to a growing number of exhibitions of his work’ (Hopkinson, 2008). In 1978 he showed photographs at Penwith Galleries, Cornwall, alongside those by his second wife, Mayotte Magnus, the French-born photographer with whom he would also publish books, including The Architecture of Southern England (Macmillan, 1985). Lewinski’s works were also shown in solo exhibitions at the Camden Arts Centre in 1980 and The Camera Club in 1988, and as part of the Modern Artists, Ancient Landscapes exhibition at Tate Liverpool in 2003. In 2005, a retrospective of his works was held at Chatsworth, Derbyshire (where his archive of more than 300 photographic portraits of artists is now held, having been acquired by the Earl of Burlington in 2002 for the Devonshire Collection), and in the same year a collection of his photographs was published by the Royal Academy of Arts in Portrait of the Artist: Photographs by Jorge Lewinski: Four Decades of Art.
Jorge Lewinski died in London, England on 31 January 2008, survived by his second wife, his sons and his stepdaughter. His works can be found in UK public collections, including Chatsworth House; National Portrait Gallery; and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Jorge Lewinski]
Publications related to [Jorge Lewinski] in the Ben Uri Library