Joanna PIOTROWSKA
Untitled, 2017 (Shelters)
silver gelatin hand print
21.6 × 27.2 cm
(8.5 x 10.7 in)
Edition of 5
The series of shelter photographs were shot across multiple cities – London, Lisbon, Warsaw and Rio de Janeiro – in which concerns about personal security differ sharply. Each little structure gives a miniaturised view into the subject’s life: the objects they surround themselves with and their relative desire for comfort, elegance or solidity.
“The shelter is like a fortress for our bodies, an extension of our selves. It is about how we choose to live, what we’ve surrounded ourselves with,” she says. “It’s also a little absurd that an adult is building this temporary, fragile structure. It isn’t really giving us any protection because it’s so ad hoc.”
An excerpt from: “Gimme shelter: Joanna Piotrowska on her unsettling domestic scenes“, written by Hettie Judah for The Guardian, 7 March 2019
Joanna PIOTROWSKA
Untitled, 2017 (Shelters)
silver gelatin hand print
21.6 × 27.2 cm
(8.5 x 10.7 in)
Edition 4/5 + I AP
Joanna PIOTROWSKA was born in 1985. She lives and works between London and Warsaw. PIOTROWSKA studied photography at the Royal College of Art in London and Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków.
Her photographic practice focuses on familial structures and their relationship to the wider systems—including politics, economics, social, and cultural life. She explores the past and the present, showing all the inequalities of power and psychological drama, and translating the gestures and everyday intimate behaviours into new scenarios – giving them an almost caricature-like quality. PIOTROWSKA uses her surroundings to show the anxiety and psychological tension of the domestic space, rather as a document of a performance than a documentary image.
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