Lewczyński was inspired by surrealism (for instance Unknown from the series later called Wawel Heads) and Man Ray’s rayograms. He created negative photomontages, which referred to the civilizational changes occurring in Silesia, and was also the author of staged works. Lewczyński said of his work:.
Each photograph comes into being when I notice something, or come across something in my environment, which moves my imagination and my conscience (…). A camera in a photographer’s hand is a kind of eternal pen, writing down his inner tensions, among other things, for the future.
In the years 1945-51 he studied at the Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice. Since 1956 he has been a member of the Association of Polish Art Photographers and since 1951 he has been a member of the Gliwickie Photographic Association. In the 1980s and '90s he repeatedly sat on the Artistic Board of APAP. From 1988 to 1993 he was a lecturer at the Higher Photographic School of APAP in Warsaw.
In the 1990s he formed the final version of his conception of the "archeology of photography", on which he had worked since the 1960s. He wrote about it:
I use the term archeology of photography to describe actions that help to discover, research and comment on events, facts and situations, which happened earlier, in the so-called photographic past. Thanks to photography, the continuity of the visual contact with the past creates a possibility for the old culture-creating spheres to influence the current ones.
Kazimierz Nowosielski writes on the Galeria FF website that there is a "certain aura of mystery and magic" in Lewczyński's works and that the most distinctive thread of his oeuvre is this very "archaeology of photography", defined as a process of "restoring meaning to things that were rejected, disregarded, doomed to oblivion or being at the mercy of fortune". Nowoslielski remarks on Lewczyński's fondness for photography's afterlife, of photographs and negatives that have been abandoned and ruined, that are full of "existential meaning" and "documentary value", its hero not in the subject but in the effects of time, damp, mold and weathering.
In 1999 Lewczyński published the Anthology of Polish Photography 1839-1989 (Bielsko-Biała 1999), the first publication of its kind in Poland. Since the end of the 1960s he began perfecting his own style, which is filled with references to amateur photography (Exhibition of Subjective Photography in 1968, among others). The artist is also inspired by his family photographs, which date back to his childhood and to the experiences of the war. Lewczyński was also influenced by feature films (in the 1950s he was fascinated by Italian neorealism) and especially by Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up. He made use of found and worn-out negatives (Triptych Found in the Attic, 1971). He often presented them in sets composed from a few works. The order of the arranged pieces created a narration, which told a "film" story (Childhood, 1968; Door, 1971). At the same time in world photography Christian Boltanski, Michael Snow and others worked in a similar context, which referred to the broad concept of amateur photography. Lewczyński’s actions preceded artistic interests in photography being a "common memory" or "archive of history", which by the 1980s became a popular idea in world photography (Alexander Honory, for example).
I always emphasize that I am not a scholar. My reflections are those of an amateur, but I believe in them. I don’t throw away a single photograph and I have enormous quantities of this material (…). Old photo books, old materials, old stories, texts, memoirs of good people and bad, photographs of tears ... a whole mass of things that once were.