agnieszka sosnowska – Acetylene Eyes

Agnieszka Sosnowska – Lansendi, Iceland (2012)

I first encountered Sosnowska’s work through Lensculture’s underwhelming showcase of her work.

Several months later, I caught a broader cross section of her work as part of the Traces of Life exhibition at the Reykjavik Museum of Photography.

What struck me immediately was how good her printmaking chops were and how her digital presence seemed almost completely devoid of life by comparison.

Yet what strikes me looking at this photo which–excepting the stunningly luminous range in skin-tone and subtle gradations in the sky, which my guess would be were burnt in–limits everything in the frame to three zones: the textured black sand (Zone II), the dark grey rocks (Zone IV) and the sky (Zone IX).

It’s also interesting to note how Sosnowska has been working with variations on the idea of the image for more than a decade. For homework: compare and contrast the above with this photo from 2007.

Agnieszka Sosnowska – Nowell, Massachusetts (1991)

If you follow this blog for the artier stuff, then you are probably already familiar with Lens Culture.

They do some rad stuff: serving as the impetus for posts featuring the work of Anna Grzelewska and Kumi Oguro.

Honestly, I was thoroughly underwhelmed by their presentation of Sosnowska. By focusing solely on her work’s ‘coming to terms’ with her families immigration to Iceland, there’s this sort of O Pioneers! vibe to it that registers as coy, sentimental and over-precious.

While I was in Iceland, the boastfully named Ljósmyndasafn Reykjavíkur, or Reykjavík Museum of Photography, had a show up called Traces of Life featuring a smattering of Sosnowska’s work.

I can’t speak to the quality of curation of the show–it seemed to lack an overarching cohesion and although explicitly preoccupied with self-portraiture, a great deal of the work was abstract in a way that beggars the question: how is this self-portraiture? (Not that most of the work on display offered much guidance on how to address such questions.)

Still, I have to qualify it as a success because I walked away with a respect for Sosnowska, I would have otherwise missed. Part of it was realizing that her work is fundamentally rooted in self-portraiture. Second, nothing available online does her images justice. She makes rich, contrasty, 3D baryta prints that are small, make stubborn demands for intimate observation and seethe with the ambiguous intention of a stumbled upon coiled serpent.

Source: sosphotographs.com