honorable mention
Iwona Germanek poland
title
Zielnik
It started with old family albums, found on the bottom of my mom’s drawer. My relative’s faces, so distant, stared at me, people I have never met. The most mysterious for me, was a small album full of photographs traces – in what an emphatic way it was talking about the fragility of being, about passing away, time and memory. After that, came the orphaned, unwanted photographs from street markets and stalls. Stranger’s faces, which became close to me, landed on my wardrobe’s shelves and occupied my thoughts. Their beauty and melancholy recalled a herbarium created during school years. By analogy, I started to connect photographs with plants through scanning the flowers and leaves. The gesture of scanning reminded the pages of the old newspapers and books, between which I once enclosed plants, drying them and allowing them to die. A choice of plants to my project was not accidental. All of them come from my family garden, which was always present in my life and in my mother’s life. The time of this place’s greatness is long gone. Neglected, unwanted orchard, where the old apple trees still perversely give fruits and where daffodils decorate the overgrown flowerbeds here and there.
Photographs and plants from the orphaned garden that were not needed by anyone met in my herbarium to attract someone’s attention again.
Graduated a Photoeducation Photograohy School in Katowice and the AFA Wrocław Photographic School. Currently a student of Institute of Creative Photography in Opava. Member of (ZPAF) the Union of Polish Artists Photographers. Currently an animator of classes at MDK (Comunity centre) in Łaziska Górne, where she initiated the Alternative Photography Workshop. She conducted workshops at the TIF Center in Wrocław (collodion process) and at the State Higher Vocational School in Racibórz (collodion process, cyanotype)
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entry description
You place the autumn leaves fallen from the trees, wildflower petals that still smell like spring and small fragments of plants between the pages of a book you have been reading a long time ago. You create a herbarium. You paste old photographs, scraps of pages written with school ink, preserved on a yellowed paper into the album. You create memory.It started with old family albums, found on the bottom of my mom’s drawer. My relative’s faces, so distant, stared at me, people I have never met. The most mysterious for me, was a small album full of photographs traces – in what an emphatic way it was talking about the fragility of being, about passing away, time and memory. After that, came the orphaned, unwanted photographs from street markets and stalls. Stranger’s faces, which became close to me, landed on my wardrobe’s shelves and occupied my thoughts. Their beauty and melancholy recalled a herbarium created during school years. By analogy, I started to connect photographs with plants through scanning the flowers and leaves. The gesture of scanning reminded the pages of the old newspapers and books, between which I once enclosed plants, drying them and allowing them to die. A choice of plants to my project was not accidental. All of them come from my family garden, which was always present in my life and in my mother’s life. The time of this place’s greatness is long gone. Neglected, unwanted orchard, where the old apple trees still perversely give fruits and where daffodils decorate the overgrown flowerbeds here and there.
Photographs and plants from the orphaned garden that were not needed by anyone met in my herbarium to attract someone’s attention again.
about the photographer
Iwona GermanekGraduated a Photoeducation Photograohy School in Katowice and the AFA Wrocław Photographic School. Currently a student of Institute of Creative Photography in Opava. Member of (ZPAF) the Union of Polish Artists Photographers. Currently an animator of classes at MDK (Comunity centre) in Łaziska Górne, where she initiated the Alternative Photography Workshop. She conducted workshops at the TIF Center in Wrocław (collodion process) and at the State Higher Vocational School in Racibórz (collodion process, cyanotype)
back to gallery