A BODY IN THE LANDSCAPE – THE LANDSCAPE OF A BODY
I have become a fan of Wanda Michalak. I am being serious here, though I realise that calling myself ‘a fan’ while the Author of Photography is in question, may sound a little odd. But I do say so for a reason. Her photos are of this special kind – the kind of pictures you want to look at first thing in the morning – even if it is before your morning coffee – but also at any hour, somewhere in the middle of a day – as you are just heading that important job interview, for example. There is something gallant about the photographs, and that is actually what you may need as a just-to-be interviewee for a job. Maybe the reason for my becoming a fan is rather little professional, but I guess I do not have any grounds to underestimate that reason, either.
Wanda Michalak was born in Warsaw in 1952, now she is living and working in Amsterdam. She may seem a real city dweller, but her latest exhibition deals with a general concept of scenery.
“A naked human body becomes a scenic area”, Michalak reviews her works, and what she says is directly and literally true. A photographed body turns into a landscape framed as a part of attractive scenery. But such remark – which, as a matter of fact, would do – does not include something more the photographs reveal: mystery. All the pictures are black and white, and seem to impress on the viewer their extra-temporal quality, or, better said, they seem to travel you in time back to more or less 1930s. Such associations are reasonable and do not clash with any interpretation.
“Myself-portraits present a world that is beautiful, pure and romantic”, says Wanda Michalak. Well, it is romantic and lovely indeed, but most of all it emanates a sense of unease, giving you that disturbing feeling of anxiety.
World Watching series is a cycle of pictures resembling visual entries into a diary – a chronicle of places and emotions. The author has apparently had a lot of fun preparing the series; there were times of extreme rapture and as big disappointments, sometimes she got scared, too. “Well, I just love being a landscape”, she wrote in the introductory note to the exhibition catalogue.
From the very first look taken at the pictures, in the mind of the viewer may start to grow a thought of how good it would be, just once in a while, to become an area of scenic beauty. In mine – it does!
Shots-at-a-glance are dynamic, the naked body – as if freeze-framed in motion – is a part of nature: a human being on the run, an earthly creature in the course of evolution. A tiny figure and in the background – nature emanating power. All that in the quality of happening in a relaxed and normal way that you would expect, plus the colours of black and white, tousled hair and a face with its imperceptible features for it is too far for any details to be seen.
Self-portraits are most difficult to shoot, as Marek Grygiel – the author of an article on the latest Michalak’s exhibition – comments on the art of photography in “FotoTAPETA” (fototapeta.art.pl). But it has been years now since Michalak first undertook that field of photography and she eagerly continues her explorations. And – they end in undeniable success.
“Whereas the key element of most self-portraits is usually a human face, Michalak decided to raise the bar a little higher and extend the range of camera focus from a face to whole body. A body makes up an integrated and fundamental constituent of all the photos in the cycle”, we can read in “FotoTAPETA” and see a few examples of how such self-portrait technique is used.
The series shifts the viewer into the picturesque world from the time the author was off on her travels. There are, for example, photos shot in Royal National Park in Australia in 2004. Michalak is careful with the selection of places to be eternised in a picture; the place is always secluded, making the impression of only the author, her camera and us (as viewers) secretly taking a peek. Using such technique in self-portraits allows of both intimacy and uninhibited honesty which excuses us from watching. The poses adopted by a naked woman are neither erotic, casual, provocative, nor appearing nonchalant. But they are “very something”. The author’s camera is as if stuck in the centre of a cyclone eye.
Cuts of action scenes taking place during travel are equally interesting. “We can see a personal experience relived, and that is what the photos convey. They are not just an attempt to present another, distinct place”, says Grygiel. To me, they also tell a story of femininity, power and material coating in which a bodily shell is a part. Not by chance. As there are no coincidences. It is not unplanned that we can see a birch-woman (World Watching series, Finland, 2003), or a fern-woman – a huge fern flower, to be more precise (New England National Park, Australia, 2003).
At a portrait exhibition, conventional photos of this kind are a must. So, the author invites her friend, Pete Parnell – a photograph with whom she has collaborated for a while now and who is working on the authorial project based on picturing human physiognomy and different frames of mind of people connected with their joint venture gallery. Marek Grygiel describes this clash between the two kinds of portraits as an interesting event which proves the unremitting power of photography, “the possibilities of its multifarious use and varied interpretations”.
The archives of “FotoTAPETA” are worth browsing through to find other photographs made by Wanda Michalak. For example, you may come across a ‘moon series’: a Mexican coast, great mountain chains of Switzerland, the remote land of Africa’s Cameroon, the home town of Amsterdam, Ireland, Naples… A set of pictures presented as a ‘moon diary’ – photographs shot as if in a hurry, on the run: they are original, all blurred, vague, very emotional. A traveller paying a nocturnal visit to a place.
Or you may also have a look at the 2005 theme photos, the cycle entitled: men. And there they are – barefooted, soldierly-looking, wearing military uniform trousers and T-shirts. Michalak asked them to pose in front of the camera and boost an image of a man who is about to give a hug to someone standing as if in the place of the viewer. It must be admitted that in this just-before-the-embrace pose they make the impression of being quite helpless or (quite the opposite – ) too eager. Anyway, from a purely observational point of view it must have been quite an interesting experience. There are photo catalogues of this exhibition (in Amsterdam?).
Wanda Michalak is one of those photographers who are inquisitive about the works of other artists and, what is more, she is seeking mutual dialogue of the arts. The portrait exhibition entitled “Dialogues, dialogues” – another inspiring venture, by the way – reflects Michalak’s attitude towards her colleagues and their creations. The portal includes a few “dialogue” photographs, a few pictures of people – photos put together to form sets, portrait photo-understatements. The effect was recurrence, repeatability of features common to different persons, persons and animals, someone to someone. Various props matched the exhibition theme and its essence. Wanda Michalak is a fascinating and human artist.
“FotoTAPETA” features a photograph picturing a group of women – all with their clothes on and one naked. The naked woman is aware of her nudity; she is standing in the very middle of this companion composition and looking boldly at the camera. She is standing bolt upright, taut as a line. It may be Wanda Michalak herself.
As a fresh fan, I am open to a dialogue precisely like this; I look at all her works courageously, without hesitation. Maybe I will pay Amsterdam a visit, not now, later, when I close “FotoTAPETA”. Maybe I will wait for the next, exceptional and out of the ordinary photo diary of (as if) totally ordinary expeditions.
Miłka O. Malzahn
Translated by Dominika Szkoda
Discussed journals FotoTAPETA