Whose work are you loving these days?
For a while now I’ve been admiring Alicja Brodowicz’s photographic work. I was drawn to her deep blacks and remarkable composition while exploring very familiar subjects: motherhood, self-portraiture, aging, life in a small town, literary encounters. She creates incredibly compelling stories. What I particularly enjoy in her images are their poetic, playful and sometimes slightly surreal qualities. We actually finally met at a INTERPHOTO festival in north-east Poland last year so I was really happy to connect with her on a personal level too.
I also love the dreamy and sensual images of Laura el Tantawy, for example from her project ‘Beyond Here Is Nothing’. The way she captures moments and their emotional impact really moves me. Laura also creates stunning photographic books which are true objects of art and very often challenge our understanding of what constitutes a book.
A few months ago I opened an account on Instagram and this was a revelation. I found so many talented artists there! I immediately fell in love with the eerie portraits of Deborah Sheedy, playful self-representation by Dorota Brzezicka’s, stunning movements of Victoria Lincoln, atmospheric images and films by Weronika Izdebska, still lifes by Masha Sapego, poetic landscapes by Michael Klimkovich, beautiful dark stories by Gerasimos Platanas, street impressions by Olga Karlovac whose latest book ‘disarray’ I’ve really enjoyed, and many others.
What book is on your nightstand?
On the top of the book pile there is the latest translation of Nikolai Gogol’s short stories And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon published by Pushkin Press, 2019) which was done by my husband Olly who is a literary translator from Russian. It’s my first encounter with Gogol’s extremely well structured world in which unusual things happen, breaking the seemingly unbreakable order while bringing comic relief to the reader. I’ve just finished it and really enjoyed it. In the last few months I went through a number of books, mainly historical accounts of the Victorian mental asylums which were a background read for my photographic project ‘Hysterical Woman’ on the life of the trilingual writer of Polish origin Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska (1872-1925) who died in a mental asylum in Gloucester, totally forgotten. I wanted to learn more about how these institutions functioned before I went to shoot the final parts of my series in a former asylum. I’m still dipping in and out of them and at the same time I’ve started reading a book on photographs either taken by women or depicting an interesting female persona entitled Historia jednego zdjęcia: Kobiety (‘A Story Behind a Photograph: Women’ by Jakub Kuza and Paulina Tyczkowska, published by Znak) which is quite gripping. There is also Igor Prosner’s stunning photographic book Past Perfect Continuous on my nightstand. I got it last year and love to come back to his arresting, Dostoevskian images from St Petersburg. They are so evocative!
Your practice in 5 #
#poeticsofexistence
#lightandshadow
#deepblacks
#whoami
#whereishome
What’s on your mind?
At the moment I am working with a very talented designer Victoria Forrest on making a book of my ‘Hysterical Woman’ series. I love the way Victoria brings the subject matter into the book form and how deeply she engages herself with the topic. It’s such a collaborative and enjoyable process. While working on the images I love listening to the Moroccan artist Hindi Zahra, especially to her songs in Berber language which make me focus on the beautiful interaction between sounds of the music and the sounds of the language. If I want to get a bit more energized I turn to Silvia Donati and her jazzy beats.
How does the body – yours and others‘ – influence your work?
As a photographer I find that I have this rather paradoxical relationship with my own body. When I photograph in public and would like to capture something without being noticed I wish I could somehow suddenly dissolve and disappear, become bodiless. Usually the more I try the more obvious it becomes to everyone round me so I am not particularly comfortable photographing in this way. I much more prefer an intimate way of creating an image by working with someone and getting inspired by their body moves, facial expressions, their personality and way of being. Recently I started taking self-portraits which is a completely different bodily and mental experience. The body, well my own body, suddenly becomes the centre piece, the main subject, there is nothing else, just that. At first I felt uneasy making this step from being hidden behind the camera to being exposed in front of it. Later it started to somehow have a liberating effect on me where I was able to see myself not as myself but as a creation of my own imagination. Apart from posing these initial mental challenges, self-portraiture is also technically the most demanding form of photography for me and I like to test myself and my body in that respect too.
Ania was born in Gdynia, Poland
She lives and works in Oxford, UK.
October 2020
Hysterical women (2020), photo series
A few years ago I came across manuscripts written by a forgotten, trilingual writer Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska (1872-1925), who died in a mental asylum in Gloucester. They depict a woman’s struggle with mental illness and societal conventions. I was struck by her strong voice and unconventional prose but even more so by her life. Sophie not only struggled with her relationship with her mother who refused to educate her and wanted to marry her off as soon as possible. She also was faced with the bankruptcy of the family estate, her father’s sudden death, bouts of severe depressions, forced migration from Central Europe to the West (France, US and UK), struggles with finding employment, suicide attempts. Finally, she was hit by the biggest of blows: the death of her partner Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, French modernist sculptor, eighteen years her junior, during the First World War, followed by her own incarceration in a mental hospital.
Alluding to the ancient definition of melancholy (black bile) and Western association of black colour with mourning and death, I tell her story through black and white images. By borrowing the title for this series from Sophie’s unpublished and highly autobiographical novel ‚Hysterical Women‘, I wanted to directly connect with her and expand on the novel’s theme of the limits of human endurance. How much can we bear before we begin to fall apart? When does madness start to claim us?
