GRANDMOTHERS
GRANDMOTHERS
CREDITS
Grandmothers, by Polish artist Magda Kuca (b. 1993), is a sentimental project about the artist’s grandmother and her general ancestry, photographed using the 19th century ‘wet plate’ technique (wet-collodion process). The process, discovered in 1851, involves adding a soluble iodide to a solution of collodion which, when coated on a glass plate, results in a photographic image not dissimilar to a daguerreotype.
Kuca is interested in discovering what “old-fashioned imaging methods can tell us about the present”. By photographing her grandmother in present time, using such an old fashioned method of image-making, a thought-provoking middle ground is formed. As Kuca puts it, the “marriage between technique and subject allows (her) to engage with the question of how photographers can manipulate the reception of a photograph by placing older techniques in contemporary contexts.” However, despite the photographs looking like ancient artefacts, the images are stunningly well-detailed and offer insight into the history of photography overlaid with Slavic tradition and timeless familial relationships.
