Fotografie
Polnisches Institut
Mittwoch, 3. November 2010

My three year-old son is always looking at pictures, reproductions, and photographs, and asks me whether what can be seen in them is real. Karolina Kowalska’s pictures call forth both these fundamental questions regarding the authenticity of an image and our distrust in it. The artist achieves this effect by combining documentary photographs with manipulated images in a way designed to explore the truth in both components. Sometimes she superimposes the pictures; in other works, she cuts out parts of reality, or intervenes into the structure of representation only with great caution. In other instances, she presents raw materials without any alterations.

The quest for truth in photography becomes doubly difficult in these works because we have long lost faith in their documentary and objective function. For even when a depiction has not been subject to alteration, manipulation may well have been at the root of the author’s intention. The selection of detail and context, the focal width and the size of a picture–each of these decisions implies an adulteration and manipulation of reality.

A form of photography that does not lay claim to objectivity and allows intervention, by contrast, becomes a metaphor of events; an accumulation of sensations, a foretelling. The emotions or ideas an image calls forth become more real than the picture itself. But can we call the emotions engendered in this way true?

I hope my son will wait a little longer before asking this question.

Magdalena Kownacka