Les Szurkowski

Les Szurkowski is a photographer, graphic designer and illustrator. Les began his creative journey in 1966 with high-school photography and continues today through graphic design, illustrations, art and book design.

Les, a Wacom evangelist, combines many disciplines into one organic entity, but he is also a manic picture librarian, maintaining a collection of over half a million images. They mainly serve him as visual notes, memories and graphical quotes, as Les has never been much interested in the pure photographic image itself. Even during the ’70s, he was creating images based on photography but always with a strong visual concept in mind.

So how does someone go about his work and visions with appreciation for today’s sophisticated tools when he has worked for so many years with scissors, glue, paper and photo prints? (Remember those?) Believe it or not, the first thing Les does is to take a walk in the forest or spend several hours in the bathtub. Once he figures out what he wants, he starts making sketches and searching his archives – sometimes for days – to find the proper images. His next step is to mix the realities of a painter, graphic artist, photographer and typographer into one medium that can be read on many levels – historical, visual, typographical, symbolic, and so on.

In Les’ self-portrait, he is standing in front of the shopping window of a toy store or an antique shop. Many little things stand out at first sight, and then you discover more and more as you stand there longer…