Edward Hartwig was born in Moscow in 1909 and he died in Warsaw in 2003. The most important creator of artistic photography in the second half of the twentieth century, he was a co-founder of the Związek Polskich Artystów Fotografików (Union of Polish Art Photographers) and one of its activists. He was the author of several dozen photographic albums and an artistic photographer whose work encompassed a wide array of genres and a broad formal spectrum, ranging from travel, portrait and theatrical photography to photomontage and experimental, intensely rasterised studies verging on the abstract.