I first became aware of Magdalena Wywrot in 2016 when I happened upon the mysterious images on her Instagram feed. In grainy, high-contrast black and white, they were glimpses of a darkly imaginative universe that she had created within the confines of her small flat high above the streets of Kraków. In it, her daughter, Pestka, danced, laughed, daydreamed or stared moodily out at the world below, a nocturnal cityscape of twisting highways and tram tracks that, bathed in the harsh glow of tall street lights, appeared luminous and unsettling, almost dystopian in its eerie emptiness.
Their intimate mother-daughter dynamic was such that Pestka, even as a young child, seemed utterly at ease in – and acutely aware of – the transformative eye of the camera, whether returning its gaze with a look of fierce intensity or caught in a blur of almost demonic movement as she jumped with abandon on her bed.
“Most of the time, we were just having a lot of fun,” Magdalena tells me over the phone from that same flat in Kraków. “Many of the photographs were totally spontaneous but, as it grew into a project, they became a little bit more thought out in terms of composition. But always I went with my instinct. From the start, I wanted to make a project about my daughter growing up, but not in a straightforward documentary way.”
Pestka, now 22, has since left home, but has returned to the flat today to join her mother for the interview, occasionally acting as an interpreter when her mother struggles to find the right words in English.
“For me, for as long as I can remember, it was just normal to be photographed,” she says. “I don’t think I ever questioned it. It’s only now, when the book is about to be published, that I’ve zoomed out and thought, this is a bit strange. When we were doing it though, it just felt organic and natural.”
The book in question, simply titled Pestka – which variously means seed, shell and kernel and is actually her daughter Barbara’s nickname – is a deftly distilled version of Wywrot’s Instagram feed that moves between the intimate and gothic, the fragmentary and filmic, albeit in a wintry, noirish and quintessentially eastern European way.
Throughout, it is Wywrot’s instinctive understanding of the transformative possibilities of blur, grain and high contrast that imbues her portraits and landscapes with such a sustained atmosphere of fragmentary otherness. Even when the location shifts fleetingly to America, where Wywrot’s parents live, the expressionist mood is sustained in dreamlike landscapes of lakes, trees and beaches that look bleakly beautiful in the manner of early, monochrome Jim Jarmusch movies. Seen through Wywrot’s eye, everywhere is stranger than paradise.
As her daughter moves from childhood to adolescence and beyond, the photographs become more expressionistic, and, if anything, even darker and more strange. In several, Pestka appears as a shadow figure, indistinct and almost ghostly. In one striking image, her silhouette, reflected in the glass of their tower block window, seems suspended above the nocturnal streets of the ominously deserted city.
“Mother-daughter projects are not unusual in photography, but most are sanitised and sentimental,” says the photography writer and curator David Campany, who edited the book. “There is a darkness to Magdalena’s work, combined with a sense of play and possibility that gives a wholly new feel to the love and tenderness that’s underneath it all. Mother-daughter relationships are deep and complicated. We all know this, but we rarely see it.”
Wywrot once attended a two-month workshop by the Sputnik collective of eastern European photographers, but her self-taught style has few conscious traces of that or any other photographic touchstones, such as the Japanese Provoke movement of the late 60s, in which graininess and movement was an aesthetic. “I have no idea of photography predecessors,” she says. “My main influences are my imagination, literature – mostly the whole gloomy gang, including Dostoevsky and Kafka – and my crazy childhood.”
Wywrot grew up in a huge house in the small village of Pogórska Wola in southern Poland, where her father worked as a locksmith and a stonemason who specialised in tombstones. “He liked to work at night in the actual cemetery, and all of us children would go with him at 3am in the deep night,” she says. “My job was to go to the well, draw water, and bring it back to him. I think all the elements that form my distinctive style are rooted in my childhood, when I experienced the world in vivid pictures. I loved to watch the changing light through the day, but with the camera I try to speak not with light, but darkness.”
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Before she turned to photography, she was a working musician, playing the clarinet and guitar in a quartet that performed classical, swing jazz and what she calls “very modern music”. She met Pestka’s father, who was 23 years older then her, when she was finishing high school, and they were married when she was just 19. Unsurprisingly, it did not work out and she moved with her young daughter to Kraków. She began photographing Pestka, she tells me, almost as soon as she emerged from the womb.
“I think that when a child is born, one naturally reaches for a medium that can freeze time,” she says in a follow-up email. “That’s how it was in my case: her first birthday party, her first school play, her eye surgery, a vacation in the mountains. I documented things just like any mother would but I wouldn’t call it photography. My photographic awareness – the understanding that photography could be a medium for self-expression – came later, when I realised I could ‘write’ by photographing.”
The mysteriously expressive narrative that Wywrot has created through her images is in one profound way a reflection of the deep bond between mother and daughter, but it is also rooted in the creatively imaginative environment she created for their collaboration to flower. That, in itself, was an act of defiant self-determination, as Wywrot makes clear.
“I was told by so many photographers, ‘Do not touch this subject of your daughter. The family is sacred.’ But I thought, I can do this, I can go outside the one-dimensional portrait of the smiling, always happy daughter and make something more challenging and difficult. I can try to reflect the turbulence inside.”
Her daughter takes over. “There is a saying in Poland – ‘Don’t tell anyone what is going on inside your house’. It’s a traditional cultural thing that is deep-rooted, but Mum was a rebel.” She sounds proud.
“Photography, for me, is a sort of fever,” Wywrot concludes. “I never know when I will take a picture. I love things that happen on the edge of correctness, things that grate against each other. Dirt, dust, grain. I’m not too fond of correctness in life either.”
It shows, brilliantly.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
