Two-fold Photography “Pulls the Guts of Longing”

If the models, oblivious to the camera, lost in thought and hardly striking voguish poses, don’t spell it out, the grainy texture of these photographs make sure the cinematic feel isn’t lost on anyone. Ewa Adriana Szumowska, a Polish photographer, infuses her work with dreamy fuzziness, blurring the lines between here and some other, distant place not quite of our dimension, with her poignant use of filtered colors, astutely chosen focal points and, not least of all, abstracted countenances.

Szumowska’s mantra reads like a sweet, all-encompassing ambivalence: “I want to reach for a variety of topics: hot and cold, quiet and loud, strong and weak, the longing and sex, the purity of the soul and the curse.” The duality of her art, as her models fold up or spring to a cold version of life, is most evident in the black-and-white snaps. But even when color does make an – often striking – appearance, it does so with an obvious underlying contrast at its core.

The photographer doesn’t stop at just one photo to tell an episode of her story, in stead her models toss and turn, until a whole series of snaps comes to life, lending depth to her chosen theme. Indeed, she also uses poetic captions, as dainty and powerful as haikus, which are well worth the perusal. Among Ewa’s most fascinating works, check out her “Ophelia” series below – though she’s less about the Pre-Raphaelite “truth-to-nature” creed, the artist does capture death at its eeriest. Also, in a revealing twist, she allows one of her photos the tint of life, albeit pale life. It’s here that we see Szumowska’s two-fold inclination, towards both darkness and beauty.

(Source: My Modern Metropolis)