Cro & Kow photo + video
Some of our work involves Eastern Europe (Simon for example published a book project about Ukraine with Kehrer Verlag, and we’ve worked with ballet companies in Poland, Ukraine and Belarus), and apart from English we speak Polish, Ukrainian, French and Russian (to various levels…).
There’s a seemingly endless supply of coffee and chocolate biscuits in our well equipped studio at The Shore in Leith, Edinburgh. While the studio is our base and very handy for filming/photographing products or interviews, we’re equally happy filming or photographing out on location, whether it’s a documentary, promo film, event, training video or anything else!
Who & what?
We are each driven by our own separate personal projects & creative vision. We each have our own artistic practice, and that spans between filmmaking and photography, so that we may be shooting stills for a leading magazine one day & supporting one another creating an artistic film or documentary for ourselves - or for a client - the next.
Sylwia & Simon are the founders of Cro & Kow - the name came from the fact that our combined names, and Sylwia’s in particular (‘Kowalczyk’) presented challenges for some and made our letterhead really long. Google analytics showed folk searching all kind of things to find us - ‘Kawasaki’ was a common one. So we decided to simplify.
Sylwia is the co-founder and creative force behind Cro & Kow. She’s a photographer & also increasingly a filmmaker. Her background with a Masters in graphic design & photography from Krakow Academy of Fine Arts helps bring that clean modern aesthetic and an eye for the final layout. She also studied for an MFA in photography at Edinburgh College of Art.
Sylwia has a practise as an artist, where she uses a mix of collage, photography, paper sculpture and projection to create artworks that have been shown in galleries around the world.
Simon is the other co-founder and DoP when it comes to filming, and is also an established photographer. He studied at Oxford University and worked for many years in Russia and Poland. He has a strong connection with Ukraine, which he published a book about with German publisher Kehrer Verlag and exhibited in some nice places, notably Rotterdam’s Kunsthal. He regularly works on editorial commissions for some of the world's leading magazines, and is currently working on a documentary film connected to Ukraine.
We’re lucky to work together with a group of talented artists on many projects:-
