Peter Jakubowski’s work is a continuous investigation into the mechanics of sight. His career is not a series of disparate roles as a photographer, digital archivist, and software engineer. Instead, it is a single, evolving inquiry into how we see the world and how technology, in turn, shapes, automates, and abstracts our perception.

He began with the grammar of the camera. After earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2007, he mastered a certain kind of institutional seeing. As a staff photographer for world-renowned firms like Robert A.M. Stern Architects and Perkins Eastman Architects, and for brands like American Girl (Mattel), he learned that a photograph is never the thing itself, but a chosen way of seeing it. His task was to render the three-dimensional world into a static, two-dimensional story, choosing one view from an infinity of possibilities.

His relationship with the image fundamentally changed, however, when he became a chronicler for his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. As the university's Staff Photographer and Digital Asset Manager, his focus shifted from creating the singular image to architecting the system that held thousands. A database, one must understand, is its own kind of machine for seeing. In designing and migrating a campus-wide Digital Asset Management system, he was no longer just framing a subject, but imposing a new, scalable logic onto a vast collection of images. The gaze was becoming systematic.

This transition from the analogue to the abstract is captured in projects like "Out My Window", a series of photographs taken from a single vantage point over the course of a year, each meticulously timestamped. More than a collection of landscapes, the series is a dataset. It is a systematic observation of incremental change that mirrors the discipline of a competitive long-distance runner logging miles on the pavement.

Today, living and working in Los Angeles, Jakubowski’s work has progressed from choosing what to see, to building the systems that see for us.

As the Founder and Lead Developer of Measure My Roof, he has engineered a full-stack, AI-powered web application that teaches a machine a new way of seeing: one where the mystique of an image is stripped away to reveal its data. This tool analyzes satellite imagery to provide roof measurements, a pragmatic application of computational vision built with Google Maps Platform and Google Gemini.

In his creative practice, he explores the ghost in this new machine. The project "Clawdia Monet" is a generative AI artist, a persona driven by a team of collaborative AI agents that produce original drawings and paintings. The AI "observes" cat photographs and generates its own unique "impressions," directly engaging with the questions of perception and authorship that have fascinated artists since the time of the Impressionists.

Perhaps the most prescient moment of his career was also his first. In June 2007, a Google Street View car driving through Milwaukee captured a figure on the roadside. This was Jakubowski, a young artist performing his first piece for an unseen, algorithmic audience. The act was a powerful metaphor for the coming age. In 2007, he wore a mask to engage with a nascent surveillance system. Today, he builds the digital "mask" of Clawdia Monet, an artificial persona designed to perform the act of artistry within a computational system. The work continues to be driven by the same urgent inquiry at the intersection of human and computational vision.

Peter Jakubowski is available for select editorial and commercial commissions, and for full-time roles and collaborative projects that require a unique synthesis of artistic vision and data-driven software engineering.

Email: peter@peterjakubowski.com

Instagram:@peterjakubowski