Stan Strembicki

Professor Emeritus of Art

“My line is always, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ And either people will say, ‘Get away from me,’ in which case you'd go, ‘Hey, I'll see you later.’ Or they'll say something like, ‘Oh, I'm okay,’ and you engage them in conversation. I like to think I can talk to anybody.”

For the past 25 years, Professor Emeritus of Art Stan Strembicki, has made unassuming “Chemical Warehouse #3” his photography studio at Tyson.

“I like to think that that's part of the possibilities—that the camera gives you license to do that. The camera gives you license to walk up to people and say, ‘I'm taking pictures,’ of people at the beach or in the cemetery. After you chat with them you say, ‘I wonder if I could make your picture?’ You wind up not only making an interesting picture, but you've informed that picture and the story that comes with it.”

An artist among researchers, Stan had been coming out to Tyson long before he acquired his studio, doing several documentary projects.

“I was interested in the remnants from when this was a munitions storage depot for the military [during World War II]. I photographed all 52 bunkers. You know, some of them are not so different, some of them are very interesting and some of them you got to really work hard to find.”

”It's a totally unique thing here. It is a wonderful space to work in with a really varied landscape. It's a wonderful collaborative exchange of ideas, even if we're not directly working with each other on projects. I think there's a lot of spillage that happens at the edges here.”

Stan shared his photography expertise with Tyson undergraduate fellows in a colloquium session during summer 2019. See some of his work here.