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Jamie Gruzska

Special Faculty & CFA Photography Administrator

Bio

Chronology and notes from conversation

At four years of age, puzzled by reproduction of a Robert Motherwell. Abstraction indelibly becomes symbolic of meaning and mystery.

At first Earth Day in NYC, struck by optimism and potential in the future.

Photographs women but does not make into prints, too embarrassed by yearning and fear of being misunderstood and misunderstanding—the inevitability of both.

Meets wife in graduate poetry seminar.

Builds “last darkroom in the Western Hemisphere” but proven wrong.

Paints espresso machines and fountains, French café scenes, and abstractions, some sourced from recurring nightmares. Teaches painting, etching, lithography, the autographic arts. Works with photo gravure and photo-polymer etching.

As my son reaches the age when I made my first photographs, I feel the need to reprint early negatives as way of connecting with youth, and one more look back.

I revisit the place where the statement was made proclaiming painting dead, a victim of the new invention, photography. I want that feeling of loss and great possibility in my work.

Collaborative. We create the work together, the way poetry works.

Not giving away the secrets, but so much desire to say it all, confess.

On Photography: I want to swim in the Sea of Analogue before we threw it all away.

Buys Olympus Pen F half-frame film camera, same vintage as self, to use as a shield against grief. Documents end of mother’s life, captures her last image.

The fact that anyone can make a powerful photograph is fascinating, if not a little threatening.

Expertise/Shame: “I am nobody. Why listen to me?”
Taste, discernment, this-not-that, all the choices, few are good. Find them.

Jamie Gruzska, Security Risk, 2026.