Joanna Piotrowska’s Other Family Albums
Winner of the MACK First Book Award in 2014, and among one of three winners for the first Jerwood/Photoworks Awards this year for FROWST - the unsettling and uncomfortable familial inspired album - Polish photographer Joanna Piotrowska creates intriguing staged images, deeply embedded with meaning.
“Interested in psychotherapies within the family structure, particularly focusing on the inequalities of power between individuals,” the London based artist who achieves her shots through experimentation, explored the oppressive and sinister side of family life in her thought-proving body of work, which was inspired by dance and performance and the German therapist Bert Hellinger, who is best known for his theory and practice of Family Constellation therapy.
FROWST captured intimate family scenes, including two adult brothers lying together on a Persia carpet wearing only white briefs, and black-clothing bodies of two embracing women, which as Mack write suggest the “atavistic overlap of mother and daughter.”
Working in black and white, as in her words it is related to the act of documentation, the photography is intentionally nostalgic for lost moment of happiness. The artist also often uses flash as she notes it “flattens the image, merges bodies with domestic interiors, objectifying them.”
Other projects using the medium include the honest series of portraits “Never is a long time” which featured in the winter 2014 issue of Dazed, capturing the “controlled chaos” and “defiant optimism of a Latvian rehab centre.”
Piotrowska’s works have been internationally exhibited in Ireland, Spain, Poland, Russia, France, Latvia and in the UK. The artist began her photography education in Warsaw in 2004 and graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2013.
This march she will be exhibiting at the photography and art gallery on the second floor of the Science Museum, London.
