Pawel Bajew's Wild Nature

Like many Eastern European artists whose brutal experiences under political oppressors forged a bleakly eloquent sense of the human comedy, 34 year-old Polish photographer Pawel Bajew’s view through a lens darkly is almost always accompanied by a smirk. Unschooled through the usual channels of photographic training, Bajew's intuitive talent began to emerge when he traded in his smart phone for a camera. Now he's busy assembling a unified body of work that magnetizes elegance in the weird, and vice versa. What follows is our selection of Pawel's work — including several self-portraits — that navigates the edge of wild and culture.