Jeffrey Czum (b. Buffalo, NY) is a contemporary photographer and digital artist whose work transforms ordinary subjects into striking visions of minimal surrealism. Rooted in his lifelong fascination with photography, Czum reimagines the world around him through a lens that distills reality into carefully composed fragments, revealing hidden layers of beauty, irony, and strangeness.
Based in Buffalo - the rust-belt city where he was born and raised - Czum often draws inspiration from his surroundings, using the familiar as a springboard for exploration. He refers to his works as “clean collages,” compositions that strip away distraction to heighten form, light, and texture. Everyday details - a stretch of grass, the façade of a building, a fragment of sky - are photographed with precision and reassembled digitally into seamless landscapes and dreamlike structures.
Czum’s practice is deeply influenced by cinema and pop culture. His images often evoke the framing, mood, and tension of film stills, situating the viewer within narratives that feel both intimate and expansive. By merging photographic realism with constructed unreality, his work blurs the line between documentation and invention, encouraging audiences to reconsider how environments shape perception.
Each project begins with a mapped shot list: angles, structures, and motifs pre-visualized before the camera ever clicks. This disciplined approach allows Czum to layer components - windows, skylines, textures - into final compositions that feel at once deliberate and otherworldly. His minimalist style emphasizes negative space and sharp contrasts, creating imagery that is visually uncluttered yet conceptually rich.
From city monuments to global landscapes, Czum’s photographs capture the familiar in unfamiliar ways, transforming the banal into the extraordinary. His art offers viewers a space of reflection and wonder, where fragments of the everyday coalesce into timeless, cinematic worlds.
