Magdalena Wywrot, Pestka

Fragments

(written for the book by David Campany)

I have never met Magdalena Wywrot. A few phases of email and text messages were enough. Well, that and the photographs, of course. I had seen some of them over the years, on her rather mysterious Instagram page, and a folio now and again in interesting cultural magazines. Anyway, it turns out she had her hands full raising her daughter, Barbara, in their home in Krakow, Poland. Magdalena started photographing life with Barbara at the onset of her adolescence, around the age of 11 or 12. She continued, whenever she could, over the next six or seven years, to age 18.

Everyone’s passage through adolescence is dramatic, for parents and children. But very few parents have the presence of mind to make meaningful photographs of it all, beyond the obviously sentimental ones. As you can see there is nothing obvious or sentimental here. You might sense some stylistic cues from the histories of expressionist cinema and photography but what attracted me to this work was how unusual it is to see mother-daughter images that are quite so tender, disarming, strange, bleakly beautiful and open-hearted. It was like no family album I had ever seen.

There had been a few offers in the past to make a book, but Magdalena turned them down. She was still making the work and besides, she was too close to it all to really be able to see it, and see what it needed to be as a book. When the time came, she sent me hundreds of photographs. It was overwhelming. Without chronology it felt like a torrent of moments, each one special, each one its own intense mark in the lives of two people.

When we first look at photographs, we decide which we like, often without understanding them. I let myself do that with Magdalena’s pictures, then I put them away. After a few weeks I looked at them again. New favourites. I did this several times. Eventually, I let go of my preferences. Not deliberately. They just fell away. At that moment, looking without ego, if you are lucky, images begin to take on the presence of living people. These were not just photographs I was looking at. They were a tumultuous and long chapter in the lives of human beings growing so close while facing the challenge of eventual separation that comes with adulthood. At times, I could not tell who was Magdalena and who was Barbara – two people I know only as images. It didn’t seem right to ask Magdalena for too much background information, nor for the dates of her photographs. If it wasn’t in the images, it didn’t seem to matter.

Slowly, little groups and sequences of photographs began to suggest themselves. I could see that many pictures were taken in their apartment, which often seemed like a safe haven of play and fantasy, almost outside of time and space. There were landscapes too, and some travel. Perhaps to the USA. I found my way in to Magdalena’s way of seeing, and Barbara’s way of being seen by her mother.

People sometimes describe photography as a kind of storytelling. I am not sure about this. I think ‘story’ is what is sacrificed for the great gift of a photograph in all its still, mute, visionary mystery (if you’re lucky). Is a sequence of photographs a story? Maybe, but it is not the photographs doing do the storytelling. I think that’s something we each do, inevitably and in our own erratic ways. A sequence of photographs in a book is an invitation to imagine.

When you are watching a movie, the plot really seems to matter. Two weeks later, all you remember are fragments. They swim in your mind, free of any story. Looking back, that’s how life is, and how photographs are. We are always trying to put things together, but we never quite succeed. We have forgotten too much. But ah… what fragments!