Photographer You Should Know: Weronika Kosińska

Artful with a hint of whimsy and melancholy, Weronika Kosińska’s fashion and beauty photography exudes youthful style and elegance. It’s no wonder then, having attracted big-time clients like NIVEA and Christophe Gaillet for L’Oréal, that what inspires the Polish photographer’s work most is the women who pose before her lens.

“They are beautiful, inspiring, mysterious creatures,” she says. “I love the way they change in every shoot. Fashion works like a costume, giving way to create new character, mood and history.”

Having been published in larger European publications such as Harper’s Bazaar Romania and Elléments Magazine, her shooting style is refined, yet Kosińska—who, after a brief bout with film in high school, returned to photography with a DSLR in hand just three years ago—is completely self-taught.

Getting Personal
She pairs her Canon 5D Mark II and III cameras and her top lenses (especially the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 L Macro and the 70-200mm f/2.8 L) with a host of lighting gear: softboxes, beauty dishes, snoots, umbrellas—and she even builds her own makeshift equipment using aluminum foil, fabrics, flashlights and colorful filters.

Even with her editorial and commercial projects, Kosińska manages to add personal work into the mix, too. “I have too many ideas and too little time, but it’s interesting to observe how the most important ideas stick with me and the rest just pass by,” she says. One of those projects is her own take on Brandon Stanton’s “Humans of New York,” which a friend of Kosińska’s passed on to her. “I saw it and asked her, ‘Why don’t we have something like this in Cracow?’” she remembers. “And she said, ‘So do it.’ So I did.” Today, Kosińska’s ongoing “Humans of Cracow” has a reoccurring segmented spot in Krakow Post.

Experimenting with an international project that she’s calling “Connections,” Kosińska is also exploring a film still-type approach in which she photographs five human relationships and emotions in five different countries. She’s already made “Blackened Kiss,” a series of a man and a woman in Cracow (for which she won the fashion category in the awards show for Polish lifestyle magazine Viva! last year) as well as “Written in the Scars” between two men and one woman in Bucharest. She’s keeping the last three concepts a secret but reveals the tentative locations: London, Madrid and L.A.

New Avenues of Creativity
Kosińska taught herself what she knows today, but her humble character is quick to credit others with helping her, including those who got her interested in fashion and beauty photography to begin with. She began working with her webmaster’s girlfriend Lucyna Rossa, a makeup artist, and from there “fell in love with fashion [photography],” she says. “All the possibilities that makeup and styling give—I love it.” Beauty photography quickly followed after her friend and retoucher Dawid Żądło suggested she try it out. And with new genres of photography come new avenues of creative thinking, too, she says.

“You don’t need a lot of space to shoot something wonderful,” Kosińska explains. “A lot of my pictures were taken in my apartment, simply on the wall. So I always try to remember that the lack of creativity and willingness is a problem, not a lack of possibilities and space.”

The City of Contrasts
These days, Kosińska splits her time between Cracow, Poland, where she grew up, and Bucharest, Romania, a choice she calls unexpected and a bit accidental. “Bucharest was a very modern, cosmopolitan city, a cultural and political center with beautiful architecture,” Kosińska explains. “It was called ‘Little Paris.’ You can still see it. But then the war came, and then communism, and things began to change. The city was damaged, not only by bombs but also by new architecture. A lot of beautiful facades were replaced by ugly blocks and government buildings. All this created a strange landscape, full of surprises and things that just don’t fit.”

Visiting friends the first time around, Kosińska stayed in Bucharest a second time after attending Feeric Fashion Days, and after a third visit, she was completely taken by a city so architecturally evident of post-World War II reconstruction that she fondly refers to it as “the city of contrasts”—and in it, she’s found her place.

Though familiar with the local modeling agencies (Gaga, MRA Models Agency and HOOK, to name a few), Kosińska will occasionally find talent on the bustling streets. And while she builds her network in-person and on social media with friends and colleagues, she’s learned to open up to freelance offers and new talent recommendations. “I must admit, I have my team I love to work with, and I stick with them as much as possible,” Kosińska says. “But it’s also very nice to get to know and work with new people.”

Mastering the Details
Yet finding her footing in the industry didn’t happen overnight, and even today, Kosińska says she is still learning. One of the lessons she carries came from the New York-based photographer Ryszard Horowitz, a fellow Cracovian whom she met last year at the Viva! awards.

Horowitz, who was the president of the jury at the awards, looked through Kosińska’s photos and pointed out details she didn’t fully consider when she shot the photos: the exact, pinpoint positioning of the model’s hands, eyes, hair, dress, for example, and even the framing of the shot.

“I remember every little thing from that conversation, and it helped me a lot to put even more focus into details,” she says. “He was the master of details and was able to see so much in every part of the photo, so I learned how not to overlook some things. And now I try to stay as focused as I can, going through a lot of aspects of the photo in my head first.”

Compromising with Clients
Having a solid vision before shooting is one thing, but when it comes to creating work for clients, as Kosińska often does in commercial photography, it’s all about compromise—and that’s not always easy. “I often need to stick to the mood board, storyboard or any other board I get,” she says. “[Compromises] are useful in life, so I get over it. It’s me behind the camera, and that always gives me great possibilities.”

Her tenacity in commercial photography has helped her in more ways than one, including in getting magazines and other publications to publish her work, both by networking online and making her presence known via snail mail.

“My tip? Be patient and don’t stop trying,” she says. “Mail gets overlooked, people have bad moods and sometimes we need to give it many chances before something works out.”

See this story in the digital edition.