Ryszard Lenczewski

Ryszard Władysław Lenczewski was born on 5 June 1948 in Miłków, in Lower Silesia, into a Poland still rebuilding after the war. As a boy he played football and hockey. A love of sport led him to still photography: the first photo exhibition he visited of his own will was a show of press sports photography. That curiosity became a vocation. He entered the Cinematography Department of the National Film School in Łódź (PWSFTviT), graduating in 1974 (diploma 1975), and began a career that would take him through nearly a hundred productions in dozens of countries.

His earliest distinctive work came with Bogdan Dziworski, the experimental documentary master. Together and alongside others they made visually bold sports and circus films such as Contemporary Pentathlon (1975), Hockey (1976), Olympic Games (1978) and Arena of Life (1979). Lenczewski won a Special Award for Best Cinematography at the International Short Film Festival in Linz for the pentathlon film. Feature work followed quickly: Bestia (1978), Palace (Pałac, 1980), for which he won the cinematography prize at the Polish Feature Film Festival in Gdańsk, and Smaller Sky (Mniejsze niebo, 1980) for Janusz Morgenstern. He proved equally at home in stylized, expressionist images and in realist observation.

A long partnership with Andrzej Barański began with Woman from the Provinces (1984) and continued through By the River Nowhere, Bachelor Life in a Foreign Country and Two Moons. With Jacek Bromski he shot the popular provincial comedies U Pana Boga za piecem and its sequels. He worked with Krzysztof Zanussi (Our God's Brother, Weekend Stories), Grzegorz Królikiewicz (The Case of Pekosiński), Izabella Cywińska (Boża podszewka), and many others. He often operated the camera himself, arguing that sitting behind the viewfinder let him see the frame that mattered most.

From around 2000 he became a regular presence in British and international film and television. He shot Paweł Pawlikowski's debut feature Last Resort (2000), winning the Golden Camera 300 at the Manaki Brothers festival in Bitola; the BBC Anna Karenina miniseries; Joe Wright's Charles II: The Power and the Passion, which earned him a BAFTA Television Award for photography and lighting; and Pawlikowski's My Summer of Love (2004), nominated for the European Film Award for cinematography. Later came Intermission, Margaret for Kenneth Lonergan, The Woman in the Fifth again with Pawlikowski, and other UK and US credits. Colleagues abroad sometimes called him more than a lighting cameraman: a filmmaker who understood every stage of telling a story in images. He credited the Łódź school for that breadth.

His most celebrated achievement was Ida (2013). Preparing the film, he took roughly three thousand black-and-white still photographs that became a visual screenplay with Pawlikowski. Illness forced him to leave the shoot after about nine days; his former student Łukasz Żal finished the film as director of photography while sustaining the austere 1.33:1, black-and-white language Lenczewski had helped define. Both received shared credit. Ida won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film; Lenczewski and Żal shared an Oscar nomination for Best Cinematography, a BAFTA nomination, the European Film Award, the Golden Frog at Camerimage, the Gdynia cinematography prize, and the ASC Spotlight Award.

He never stopped teaching. At Łódź he rose to full professor of film arts (title conferred 7 October 2010), served as deputy dean of the Cinematography Department from 2008 to 2014, and mentored hundreds of student etudes into the mid-2020s. He was a member of BAFTA, the European Film Academy, and from 2015 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Poland decorated him with the Silver and then Golden Gloria Artis medals and the Silver Cross of Merit. In 2015 Bitola gave him the Golden Camera 300 for lifetime achievement; the Polish Society of Cinematographers and the Association of Polish Filmmakers later honored his whole career. In 2025 he and Katarzyna Taras published Bez lasotaśmy nie ma filmu, a spoken handbook of cinematography. He also directed personal documentaries such as Oczekiwanie (2017) and Moja bezsenna ciemność (2019).

Ryszard Lenczewski died on 25 September 2026, aged 78. Paweł Pawlikowski announced the news at the closing gala of the 51st Polish Film Festival in Gdynia. The Polish Film Institute called him an outstanding cinematographer whose vision and sensitivity to the image would remain in film history. He left no public social-media persona; his legacy lives in frames, in students, and in the idea that one picture can say more than a thousand words.