‘Magdalena Wywrot with David Campany’
True Photo Journal n.10, 2024
Contributors (in order of appearance):
- Irina Rozovsky With Tim Davis
- Collier Schorr With Elle Pérez
- Lee Mary Manning With Charlie Porter
- Ernest Cole And Lindokuhle Sobekwa
- Nick Sethi With David Strettell
- Magdalena Wywrot With David Campany
- Peter Tomka With Sammy Loren
In a small apartment in the city of Kraków, Poland, Magdalena Wywrot raised her daughter, Barbara, making photographs of their life together whenever she could. Over many years the images accumulated, until Barbara reached the age of 18. The project is called Pestka, Polish for ‘seed’, or ‘kernel’ – a mother’s affectionate name for her daughter. This is all the back story you are getting, because that is all I know, or want to know, and I think it is all you need to know.
Magdalena sent a me a folder containing about seven hundred photos. You might think that’s a lot, but how many do mothers take of their children? Thousands, I would imagine. Mostly, such images are sentimental or plain boring, significant only to those involved. Clearly, Magdalena’s are much more than that. They overflow with energy and enigma, with wisdom and wonder. When I first saw them, they astonished me. I looked at them daily for a long while. Then, Magdalena texted to ask if I would try to turn them into a sequence, something that might become a book.
Could I piece together a narrative of the life of these two people? No, not really. I could intuit that Magdalena and Barbara shared a deep sense of exploration and theatre, and between the lines I felt there were moments of pain and difficulty. But what shone through was a feeling of profound affection between people and for life itself in all its fragile, difficult beauty. Either I could have asked Magdalena hundreds of questions or I could have asked her nothing at all. I decided to ask nothing. These pictures don’t need explaining or accounting for. They don’t need the facts of a biography, nor a declaration of intent. Without all that, we have the pleasure of looking and responding for ourselves. On her rather elusive website, Magdalena has a brief statement:
In my opinion, the Earth is an incredible laboratory, in which we are destined to spend only a fraction of a second in the immensity of the universe. Everything we witness, experience and create belongs to us, regardless of what happens after our death. Life is like a vicious crazy circle, the madman’s dream. I am trying to capture the moment between dreams and reality cleanness and dirt. What I value most, is distortion – both in art and in life.
The words confirm what is there in the work: a spirit that is existential, even fatalist, with a survivor’s tenacity and a poet’s eye for the redemptive transformation of life’s raw material.
Over time, I selected and sequenced around one hundred and twenty images, and sent a PDF to Magdalena for her thoughts. “You understand my art and my life. Thank you,” she wrote. I don’t think I do understand her art or her life but, in a way, understanding is not the point, and barely even a possibility. I suspect art and life are never really understood, not even when they are our own. Yet, sometimes, if one is lucky, one can get a glimpse of the art of another human being in a way that is enough to help give it the form it needs. In essence, I think this is my role as an editor.
The Los Angeles publishing house Deadbeat Club, run by Clint and Alex Woodside, understood Madgalena’s photographs, and knew immediately what the book needed to be as an object. Restrained, richly printed, and bound simply. Every decision serves the work, serves the artist’s vision. When a book is ready, it goes into the world to belong to the lives of others, and perhaps not even to those who made it. Pestka, the book and the daughter, will be let go, to find homes of their own. I don’t know what Magdalena thinks about this, and I don’t know what she will do next, but I am grateful she made these images, and grateful the book exists. There’s a part of me that wishes I could tell you more (I’m a writer, after all) but anything else is interpretation, and with photographs as engaging as these we can all do that.