Magdalena Wywrot: Pestka

Magdalena Wywrot’s Pestka is a gravity-defying, through-the-looking-glass portrait of the life of a mother and her adolescent daughter, a series of time-lapse dispatches seemingly beamed from a hermetic space station suspended high above a planet (and Krakow, Poland) where time is literally standing still. The world outside the windows of Wywrot’s space station/apartment looks both distant and desolate and incredibly beautiful, almost devoid of a human presence. Yet the mother continues to take photos, while the daughter goes about her life and grows up before our eyes. A sort of rapture appears to have taken place outside, while an intimate metamorphosis (and an intimate surveillance) is slowly going on inside. A dreamlike sense of unsettling dislocation pervades the entire work. That sense will likely be familiar to anyone who has lived with a child and experienced firsthand the endless and startling transformations that occur—day by day and year by year—as a child grows into adulthood.

There is a fishbowl quality to Wywrot’s photos, which shapeshift, mercury-like, between Expressionism, Impressionism, and abstraction. The portraits are tender, mysterious, full of sparks of wonder and ecstasy, while the landscapes are disorienting, forbidding, vaguely apocalyptic, and often sublime. You have a sense of an unmistakable consciousness in the work, yet you’re never quite certain where you are, and there’s a moment somewhere in the book when you suddenly feel as if some giant, ambiguous lifeforce or spirit is lurking in the murky streets below, waiting for Wywrot to complete her work and turn her daughter loose on the planet.

 

The Book on the Wall 

Books are central to photography, as they are to our exhibitions, school and library here at ICP. Editing, sequencing, design and choice of materials are vital elements in the making of any photobook.  

For The Book on the Wall we invite publishers to give an insight into the making of a recent book.  

Magdalena Wywrot’s Pestka, published by Deadbeat Club, was a standout book from the end of 2024. Wywrot photographed her life in Poland with her daughter Barbara (also known as Pestka) over a period of eight years. She gave around 600 images to David Campany, ICP’s Creative Director, to select and sequence. Clint and Alex Woodside of Deadbeat Club then refined the design and chose the materials. On the wall here is a selection of final spreads from printed but unbound pages, along with test prints.