It was The Day Before that opened the doors of foreign galleries and festivals for Orłowska. The photographer was invited to participate in the project reGeneration2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today (2010). The photographs were presented on a series of exhibitions (including displays in Arles, Toronto and New York) and a catalogue accompanying them.
Leakage
Anna Orłowska, photograph from Leakage, photo: courtesy of the artist
As Professor Grzegorz Przyborek wrote about the works from the Leakage cycle:
We encounter a strange paradox – the mechanical reproduction of reality, a product of our civilisation mingles with a mental image, a sort of a spectre. This is how a myth is born. In the photographs of Orłowska it becomes credible.
Orłowska combined staged photography with documentation. In the photographs from Leakage, she joined several sets of opposites – beauty and repulsion, serenity and tension, among others. It is noticable that the photographer drew inspiration from Roy Andersson’s films. Like the Swedish director, Orłowska creates unanticipated coalescence of meanings, strange stories, and universes.
Working on Leakage, the artist changed her approach to the creative process:
I took a photograph of a girl painting the world map black but it bothered me that the viewer is looking at the map and not the heroine. I decided to limit the frame to the object itself.
The exhibition of her project at Lookout Gallery in Warsaw was an anticipation of this change. It was noticed by the critic Lidia Pańków:
Nature, the object of contemplation, loses its depth and dramatic tension. Instead, it becomes a study of visual record, subjected to scrutiny.
At around the same time, Orłowska published 150 copies of the book My Bones Will Knit in 30 Days. The language used to narrate the story is resemblant to that of Leakage; some of the works are repeated. The story in the book is more intimate, the photographer reaches out to details, an ambience of anticipation is dominant.
Case study: invisibility
Dark Sky Preserve from the project Case Study: Invisibility, photo: Anna Orłowska
The analytical approach, already in Leakage, dominated the works forming the next cycle. Invisibility was a project oriented at the possibilities of seeing. The photographer was interested in techniques linked to the art of camouflage. As she commented on the way she works in an interview:
Collecting ideas was like twirling candy floss on a stick, the word ‘invisibility’ being the latter. Anything would stick to it: gossip, anecdotes, information that I’ve read or overheard. The first impulse stemmed from being in the position of a photographer pondering upon the way in which to photograph something invisible.
