About Me

Agnieszka Rayss, photographer, freelancer, based in Warsaw, Poland. Co-founder of the Sputnik Photos collective. Her area of work is documentary photography. She studied History of Art at Jagiellonian University, and is a Doctoral student at the University of the Arts in Poznań.

She is interested in the post-soviet legacy of Central and Eastern Europe and in topics connected with its myths, history and its re-interpretation. In recent years she has also worked on themes of landscape and topics related to ecology. Her first works were dedicated to how post-communist countries were trying to copy Western trends, as well as the pop cultural manifestations of the transformation.

She has published the following photo albums: “This is where the end of cities begins” (2015) about the disturbing industrial face of urban organisms, and “American Dream” (2011) about the cultural transformation and the triumph of pop-culture in Central and Eastern Europe.

A two-time winner of the Picture of the Year award in 2011 and 2012, a two-time finalist in the Hasselblad Masters Award, finalist of the Lucie Foundation scholarship, Alexia Foundation grant, and Lens Culture Exposure Award. Winner of several national press photography competitions. Recipient of a scholarship from the Ministry of Culture, Polish-German Cooperation Foundation, Municipality of Warsaw Grant and a scholarship from the Visegrad Fund. Her work has appeared in magazines such as Newsweek, The Guardian, and others.


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