Photo | Maciej DakowiczWith four photo stories published to date and another one in our forthcoming issue 5, Maciej Dakowicz is one of NEED magazine’s dedicated contributing photographers.

We worked together on his latest assignment, covering micro-finance and job development projects in the Balkans, and it was an encounter that taught me a lot about this remarkable character, both professionally and personally.

The Polish-born 31-year-old is relatively new to photography. He picked up his first digital camera in 2003 in Hong Kong, where he lived and worked for four years after graduating from a Polish university with a master degree in computer science. He now works at the University of Glamorgan in Wales as a research assistant while doing a PhD in Computing. This eclecticism also transpires in his photography. Dakowicz has indeed demonstrated to be at ease with very different subjects, from Cambodian children working in garbage dumps to an Indian community for transsexuals, from airborne medical assistance in Tanzania to street photography in Cardiff, his current residence.

Photo | Maciej Dakowicz

Dakowicz combines in his work an acute sense of composition with an eye for the unusual details that help, in his words, to “catch something special, those quirky moments that last a split of a second and are gone forever.”

He says, “I consider myself a street photographer when I travel. I am not looking for beautiful landscapes or wildlife. I spend most of my time in cities among people, wandering in busy streets and markets, trying to catch those small decisive moments happening all the time around us. I try to get as close to people as possible, let them forget about me or somehow become indifferent to them, and when I am not in the centre of their attention anymore then I take my best photos.”

Photo | Maciej Dakowicz

Dakowicz begun working for NEED in April 2006, when he traveled to Pakistan in the aftermath of the earthquake that killed more than 73,000 people and injured 70,000.

It was the beginning of a rewarding collaboration started two years previously in a rather bumpy fashion when, during a trip to India, all his photographic equipment and personal belongings were stolen on a train. “It was a real disaster,” he says. “All my equipment, money, passport, everything important was in that bag. I shared this bad news on the Internet…I was so down. But then suddenly I received lots of emails from people encouraging me to start again, not to give up. One of them was from Kelly Kinnunen — he told me he was starting a new magazine and asked me if I was interested in contributing. So there was a positive outcome from that bad event.”

Photo | Maciej Dakowicz

The encounter pushed Dakowicz to dedicate himself to photography and produce some of NEED’s most striking images.

Asked if he thinks that photography can make a difference, he says: “Some photographs definitely change history, cause discussions, highlight problems and make people aware of certain facts. I like the motto of NEED magazine: ‘We are not out to save the world, but to tell the stories of those who are’. And I think I am like that, I am not trying to save the world, [but] I bring attention to existing problems and to people who try to solve them.”

Photo | Maciej Dakowicz

Photo | Maciej Dakowicz

Maciej Dakowic’s pictures can also be seen on Flickr, where he is described as “the best people photographer” and “Truly a photojournalist in the making.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 11:20 am and is filed under Journalist Profiles, Photo Essays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.