In his creative practice, Iwanowski focuses on the relationship between image and memory. The artist associates this theme directly with his personal instincts, saying:
My memory is so-so. A mess, fragments, trivial things in a bundle. To my misfortune, this is paired with an unstoppable need to remember. Based on the naïve belief that photography has the power to store, I instinctively started to photograph the persons and places whose loss I feared the most. Later, buried in photographs, like Roland Barthes, I searched for those persons and places in them, often to no avail. Initially, it was disappointing. With time, however, I started being more forgiving towards photography and having fewer expectations about it.
To Iwanowski, the photographic medium is not a proof of existence, but only its interpretation. That is why the artist’s projects are always accompanied by text, telling a story alongside them. So far, he has created four projects framed in this way: Minus The Mother, Fairy Forts, NE, and Clear of People.
Minus the Mother, 2006 – now, photo by Michał Iwanowski The most personal out of the above is Minus the Mother, featuring artistic photographs of the artist’s mother. Iwanowski started taking the photographs in 2006, when he learned about his mother’s terminal illness. His mother’s pictures are poetic shots, filled with metaphors and mysteries. The woman’s figure never appears in them, as if to some extent it didn’t exist anymore. Instead, there are head feet, hands, a blurred silhouette against the background of a forest, as well as several pictures of landscape, her natural environment.
Fairy Forts is a photographic documentation of a journey to west Ireland, whereas NE comprises posed photographs of persons of special importance to the artist.
Clear of People, 2012-2014, photo by Michał Iwanowski A breakthrough moment for Iwanowski was an art residency in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 2012. That is also when he came up with the idea for the project Clear of People. It consisted in recreating his uncle’s route of escape from a Soviet gulag to Poland. Based on a map created seventy years earlier and memories of his ancestors, Iwanowski travelled exactly the same path across the territories of present Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, and Poland, adding up to over two thousand kilometres.
As a photographer, Iwanowski favours modest means of expression. He usually uses a 50mm lens with a fixed focal length and an analogue camera. The colours appearing in his projects are very realistic, while his frame composition follows the classical rules. Iwanowski doesn’t engage the viewer in a play with the depth of the image or manipulate the photographs. Instead, he focuses on making the audience interested in a story in which photography only plays one part.
A book based on the project Clear of People is currently available for pre-order.
