REVIEWS  - LA PETITE MORT 2022

Krzysztof Jurecki

What do composite portraits give us?
Gabriela Kaziuk is a graduate of graphic design in Łódź. In 2021, the Commission of Examinations considered her degree the best or most mature in recent years in emerging photography and graphic design, often referred to as postmodern photography. As a postmodern photographer, her work is characterised by atypical compositions of unconventional or sometimes wholly absent subjects. Such today's photography has entered into marriage with electronic editing, which has created new possibilities of blurring, or with a suitable accentuation, emphasising reality. 
Gabriela has titled her several dozen artworks La Petite Mort, describing it as "a series of imaginary portraits of existing people whose faces hide two extreme emotions - sadness and happiness. Using digital and realistic collages, the photographer takes the viewer on a journey across the map of human emotions".
The tradition of synthetic photography
Gabriela has written an interesting Master's thesis on Francis Galton's Composite Photography and its Contemporary Continuations, which presents an overview of this type of work's characteristics and possibilities. The composite portrait in modernism was meant to create models to identify, for example, a criminal or certain diseases used for scientific and cognitive purposes. Today, the old distinctions of photography, such as truthfulness, reality and its representation, have entered into a marriage with elements coming from various spheres of imaging, e.g. fragmentariness, blurring of reality and lack of reliance on ideas (e.g. truth or wisdom), and the pursuit of virtuality and perfection of imaging. The result is a lack of general rules defining human life; hence, has not the objective become information? In this case, the tiny fragments of reality give us a hidden hybrid dimension.
What to look for?
How does Gabriela Kaziuk's photography stand in the face of such aesthetics? On the one hand, she utilises a composition-oriented approach to representation, which was developed in the 19th century and gained momentum in the era of digital imaging, thanks to pioneers like Nancy Burton. In Poland, this type of exposition is done by Aneta Grzeszykowska, and earlier on by Krzysztof Pruszkowski and Stanisław J. Woś. To maintain a specific attribute in her photography and give an intellectual framework for her exhibition, Gabriela focuses on two extreme human emotions - "sadness" and "happiness". The results are intriguing. Gabriela has added a new aspect to a challenging problem, namely synthetic portrait, generally blurring the old distinctions of photography.
Presented in grand formats, this kind of work is about searching and finding specific parts of the face and combining them into a new creation. This is extremely difficult to achieve. In one of the pieces, there is notable muscle tension in the neck, proportionally incongruous to the whole. Is this a mistake? No, it is a way that this series can continue. You can add, for example, too small eyes or too large a nose so that an intriguing image is created. Or, as Ryszard Horowitz once did in a portrait of Jerzy Kosiński, you can insert a bird's eyes to emphasise even more the creative idea of the writer - the author of The Painted Bird.
To maintain the reality ascribed to a particular person, the artist asked each portrayed person to put their "signature" - a short handwritten text referring to their attitude and perception of the world. One may ask whether a description is more reliable than a synthetic photograph or post-photograph? For instance, "The memory of having to give my cat away" or "To evoke sadness, I was thinking of my stepfather, who passed away not long before the photo session". Of course, the ideological expression of the text must be confronted with the photograph itself, which is another step to deciphering the long series.
It made a great impression on me. I first noticed the eyes; in them, I looked for the remnants of a particular person, followed by the nose and the mouth. At the same time, I realised that I could not get to the basic truth about a specific, redefined and manipulated person I did not know. Did this make sense? Yes, just as in the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci's synthetic portraits contained the stereotype of 'femininity' and 'masculinity' but, of course, on a different basis, including an unreal landscape. This was also synthetic thinking because the individual elements were real, but not the whole.
The present
We live in times when surgeons and geneticists have created synthetic and modified the first living cyborgs. Consequently, the search for this kind of imaging is one of the postulates of recent photography. However, it is becoming increasingly complex because it is difficult to determine the ultimate goal of such activities, unlike medical experiments, which are supposed to save lives.
The portraits created by Gabriela Kaziuk allow us to reflect on the tradition of this kind of imaging and the general condition of humanity. According to many theoreticians, e.g. Stelarc, this is disappearing or transforming into a new creation between the human and digital body that is supposed to be more perfect but still a utopian road to immortality.