Andrew Prokos
Andrew Prokos is a New York City-based fine art photographer whose photographs incorporate architectural elements and sweeping natural and urban views. His city and landscapes are often composed of multiple high-resolution images seamlessly merged to create large-scale compositions. This process allows him to capture an astonishing level of detail and clarity in the fine art prints he produces for clients and collectors around the world.
A master of long-exposure photography technique, Andrew utilizes exposure times of up to ten minutes to capture his subjects. The resulting images render skies and water with an ethereal softness that elevates them from the world as we see it. Human subjects are captured in a whirl of motion and often massed together in public spaces in a beehive of activity. This highly demanding genre of photography requires an extreme level of patience, as special neutral density filters are required and the photographer is often shooting blind while timing the photo manually.
Andrew’s more recent works have included experimental series which veer away from representational imagery in favor of abstraction. These include Inverted, Metropolis Abstracted, and Sylvan Landscapes. Inverted utilizes negative imagery to portray an architectural wonderland of vivid color fields, bold lines, and startling close-up views. Inverting the scene places the viewer in an alternate space free from the confines of their own positive color perception. Large-format photographs from the series are displayed at a scale of up to 2.5 meters in size, drawing the viewer in further. Inverted was awarded a silver medal at the 2020 International Photography Awards and was awarded an Honorable Mention at the 2020 Prix de la Photographie in Paris.
In Metropolis Abstracted, begun in early 2020, Andrew takes architectural details from cutting-edge contemporary buildings as the principal subject matter. In the series, Andrew abstracts the details to reveal their intrinsic geometric forms and patterns. Seen on their own, the architectural details appear to be rather mundane and uninteresting, but when reflected on themselves a fascinating, and often kaleidoscopic, scene emerges. Metropolis Abstracted was a winning selection at American Photography 37 in 2021.
In Sylvan Landscapes, also begun in 2020, the same principles are applied to tall trees and woodland scenes. Massive tree trunks, gnarled branches, and canopies of golden-green or fiery red-orange leaves take on an almost mystical sense as they are reflected to reveal their organic forms. The series marries landscape with abstraction and introduces us to the imagery that is open to a high degree of interpretation, yet firmly rooted in the traditional landscape photography genre.
