Kuba Ryniewicz

Amelia Abraham caught up with the photographer behind our MHL. + Dr. Martens shoot to talk identity, community and taking photos as a means to finding answers.

“I love my accent, but it's funny, the first question is always ‘where are you from?’, not ‘how are you?’," says the Newcastle-based photographer Kuba Ryniewicz.

The answer is complicated: “I'm British because I have a passport, and I’m Polish because that’s where I’m from. But I'll never be fully British, and I'm detached from Poland because I haven't lived there for 20 years.”

It’s this sense of in-betweenness that shapes his work, known for exploring ideas of community, home and belonging. Rather than “where are you from?” a better question, he suggests, might be “where are you coming from?”. As in, what’s your perspective, how do you think about things, and how do you see the world? For Kuba, photography is a way of answering those questions.

While Kuba doesn’t think of his work as place-based, he did start taking photos of life as a teenager in Poland in the 1990s. His uncle, an amateur photographer, had given him an old Soviet camera – “a really heavy thing, the kind you could drop and it would never break” – and taught him to develop film in the darkroom and test lights.

Taupe canvas drawstring bag with stitched patches and a worn, speckled texture

Person in a pale button-up shirt leans on a white chair beside a desk and small whiteboard

MHL. + Dr. Martens

Back then, photography was a pastime; the idea of becoming a photographer wasn’t on Kuba’s radar. This was a few years after the communist collapse, money was tight, and self-employment hadn't settled as a concept yet. “Besides, I wanted to be a writer more. That's why I studied philosophy and supported myself working as a bricklayer.”

After moving to the UK in 2004 to learn English, he gravitated towards writing about photography – interviews, research and book reviews – while continuing to take photographs on the side, before eventually deciding to train as a photographer. “I hated studying photography – I hated studying full stop. I was good at it, but I didn't like the institutional way of looking at things.”

This rebellious ethos began to shape Kuba’s photography when he started working in fashion around a decade ago. Rather than focusing his camera solely on styling and garments, he incorporated still lifes, portraits and nudes into his editorials; the approach was conceptual from the outset. “I'm not one of those photographers whose commercial work looks so different from their personal work. I adopt the stream-of-life approach.”

Black leather shoes on a person standing on a stair landing by a worn brick wall

He also casts many of his own shoots, like the recent Dr Martens + MHL. shoot, in which he visited the Dr Martens factory and photographed the people he met there. He shot using film, which he processed himself.

“Casting is important to me. It's good to create a world. When you photograph your friends, it’s like that feeling when someone visits you, and then you see where you live through their eyes, and you think, "I never saw that building!" It's like that, the way you look at them and they look at you. It's really fresh, almost like seeing anew, like a child.” Kuba often photographs friends, particularly queer people and immigrants.

Today, while he mostly shoots on Polaroid or a 6x7 medium-format camera, he sometimes incorporates iPhone images into exhibitions and editorials, rejecting photography's lingering hierarchy of formats. “I'm not ashamed to use the phone as well. It gives an element of the speed of life. I mix with other mediums for a different pace, because we're living at different paces simultaneously.” Yet, he says, the infinity of the cloud or SD drive can be overwhelming, which is why he always comes back to film. “It's a limitation and restriction and it gives me a better perspective on how to construct the story or take portraits.”

Person with bright orange hair in a black hoodie crouches by an open fridge — MHL. + Dr. Martens

Much of the magic happens in development, anyway; the process as important as taking the photo in the moment. “I love the touch, the smell, all the senses. With digital, you're losing connection with the possibilities that all the senses can give you. I like to touch every print myself.”

Just as every print is an individual, so is every portrait – it’s a way of really looking at someone and seeing them for their individuality and differences, a perspective that comes from being a queer photographer. Often, parties at Kuba’s studio become impromptu photo shoots, leading to the series Corner Study, which Kuba hopes to publish as a book next year. It combines still lifes of studio ephemera – much of it relating to gay history – with portraits of people in his community.

“My thing is to get united with my people. Still today, that's my focus: how we expand the family and network of people. The first photos were unconsciously like that and now, especially after experiencing Brexit and as a queer person and a foreigner, I am more interested in that. That's how we build community, with people from all over. It’s about how who we meet shapes us, how we reinvent ourselves in groups.”

“I took this photo as a teenager, at 16 or 17. I grew up in a small town near a national park. A group of us would sneak out of the house and hang out every day in the summer. We were into grunge and were rascals. I remember everyone wanted Dr Martens, but there wasn’t much money in Poland at that time, so we asked our relatives for second-hand military boots because they had a similar look. I was shooting on the cheapest film I could get. There wasn’t an awareness around documenting or showing photos like there is now. I was just taking photos of my friends.”
“This is my boyfriend Matthew and his best friend on a cliff in Seaham, where they used to explore sea coal. They are wearing the foils for marathon runners, and the amazing sunset reflects off the foil so nicely. I love the picture because there’s something magical about it, cosmic almost, this out-of-space feel. It looks like they’re trying to attract aliens. It’s about unity and friendship.”
“This was one of my best ever days taking photographs. I met these guys in Poznan, the city I’m from, but the photo was taken on the beach near Gdansk. One of these guys inherited a house from his family, and so he created a queer community there. A safe space, which is important in Poland. Much of my work is about community and family, and I think the intimacy of this photo speaks to that.”
“This photo was taken on my birthday a couple of years ago. The man in the picture is Glen, an engineer who lives on a boat. A friend knew him and asked me if I wanted to have my birthday on his boat. Another friend has chickens, so she brought boiled eggs. It’s an honest picture. You don’t need the face to have a good portrait. Everything has the potential to be beautiful.”
“This is a rare self-portrait, taken in my garden in Newcastle. The size of the city is perfect for me from a pragmatic point of view. I used to live in London – Newcastle has a different pace. I think this photo captures that.”