Max Sawatzki

Max Sawatzki was born in the eastern part of Berlin in the summer of 1990. He lived his first years in the district of Hellersdorf, where he and his parents lived in an apartment block built in the 1980s (a type of apartment building typical of East Berlin, known as 'plattenbau'). While still a little boy, he began to play around with parts of an old GDR-manufactured camera. Then his parents divorced and he moved with his mother to the Western district of Berlin, Wedding, a world that he experienced as strange and colorful - and which left a lasting impression on him. His work is influenced by numerous journeys around the globe and by political and social events abroad as well as in his native Europe. Due to many moves inside of Berlin he saw a lot of different ways to live, cultures and people.

 

He soon developed an interest for artistic work. In the last 10 years he has been active as a graffiti artist - today, however, the days of illegal spray-painting are long gone. Aesthetics play an important part in his works. His work with Graffiti led to a deep interest in the field of visual arts and he developed a passion for colors, shapes, architecture an photography.

 

He presently works as a freelance photographer, graphic-designer and visual artist. His main fields of work include products & still-life, landscape, nature, architecture, people, and urban streetlife photography. He is always on the lookout for new, unusual images and is always open for experimentation. His works stand out trough their diversity - they range from colorful images of people dancing in renaissance costumes to minimalistic black-and-white photography. He sees himself as someone who documents, gives new value to supposedly ordinary things, makes things visible and thereby pleasurable. His images often contain hidden messages with a humorous suggestion. He is now living in Borgsdorf, a small village between Berlin and Oranienburg, in Oberhavel (Brandenburg), north of Berlin. He works mostly in Brandenburg and Berlin but also in the whole of Germany.