Children are time maturing in a fresh body
Jul 5 — Sep 6, 2025
We were thrilled to welcome you to a special evening at the gallery on Saturday, July 5, from 5 – 8 pm, which featured the opening of solo exhibitions by Teresa Gierzyńska and Anna Orłowska, alongside a celebration of the gallery’s fourth anniversary. Thank you for celebrating with us!
In Children are time maturing in a fresh body, Anna Orłowska explores photography as a physical and emotional act of presence — a way of holding space for people, places, and the passage of time.
Her works, crossing the borders of the medium, emerge through closeness and attention, capturing the quiet rituals of care, play, and change that define everyday life.
Rooted in family and shaped by loss, the exhibition reveals how photography can both register and soften impermanence — offering a fragile thread of connection between now and then, between memory and the body.
Taming Loss
Anna Orlowska
The Necessity of Presence
Photography requires physical presence. The photographer is close to the matter – whether it is space, an object or a person – they must remain in sight. This bond breaks in the case of technical images, made by automated or remotely controlled machines. However, in photography as an artistic activity, establishing a bond through presence remains an important aspect of the artists’ performance. This is the case with Teresa Gierzyńska’s images as well as mine. I remember this electrifying thrill that I always felt when walking or driving to a place where I was supposed to find and then record the images flickering in my head. Photography requires the discipline of concentration – the eye synthesizes a multitude of elements and selects fragments, parts. Precise hand movements trigger the recording process – the lens directs photon waves onto a thin, negative film that is sensitive to them – drawing an invisible image. The light is constantly changing, so you have to act quickly, anticipating its movement. It is a choreography of routine and improvisation. Embodied knowledge.
The Bond
The situation piles up when we want to photograph a person. Getting to the point of photographing “someone” has always been difficult for me. I fantasize about Teresa’s photos. It seems to me that they were created with ease, as if the bond with the characters had been established without effort, organically. For me, creating a bond takes time. In the first spring of the pandemic, I moved back to my family home in Silesia. The days were getting longer, so we started spending more time in the garden. I sowed vegetables and built trellises for beans from long, flexible birch branches. My brothers’ children often visited us. Situations would happen and images would start to flicker. I was inspired by their games and antics – a snail stuck to their face, funny make-up, petting roosters. For them, being photographed was fun, they didn’t ask why. Maybe they felt seen? Does it mean anything? To be seen in your childhood by the adult eye of the camera?
A delicate bond is established between the photographer and the image and its subject. What is this thread of momentary understanding spun from, which connects the present with the past? Why and how can some images evoke in us a sense of transference? When we look, we experience smells and tastes or an unpleasant shiver – traces called memories. Sometimes family photos, especially those preserved on prints, demonstrate this ability.
The Otherworlds and appreciation of mourning
Photographs, especially material ones that can be held in the hands, visualize time. The landscapes recorded detach from their images, quickly changing proportions and composition, and the faces once portrayed blur under wrinkles that are not in the photo.
I have similar feelings when I look at children who change quickly as they grow up. A photo of a child is a record of the intensive maturation of time. It buds in fresh bodies, and only from it will the petals of history unfold. Each of the children begins their own story. Observing this process is fascinating.
The consequence of playing with a time machine is getting to know its shadow side, which is being a witness to transience. Photographs testify to the passage of time, many of them are objects of mourning. Especially photos of our deceased loved ones provoke such reflections. Every photographed moment has already passed, but it has not disappeared for good, it exists in us, just as a dead person does not completely disappear from our world, because after all we still have internal dialogues with them and listen to their advice given in dreams.
The idea of the Otherworlds seems to be an idea for a space containing the past time. It turns out that there were many opinions about its shape among all civilizations. Did thinking about it make it easier to accept the loss that we all encounter? By suggesting that what has passed has not been completely lost, but is somewhere nearby – the Otherworlds provides mental space to accommodate the loss. Mourning sensitizes, teaching you to notice and appreciate.
The Ritual of Loss
Photography, which requires intense engagement of the body and senses, is a specific ritual, consisting of walking, looking, activating muscles and imagination. By engaging the body and attention, we establish a bond with a place or a person, we listen and practice a kind of meditative concentration. The eye synthesizes the situation, selects the frame and the moment. A decision is made in stillness, the shutter opens and closes, a piece of time freezes, and the loss becomes visible.
I will think of myself and Teresa and other photographers, that with our movements we practice taming loss. By capturing the moment, we simultaneously testify to its passing. Preservation is separated from loss only by a thinly woven bond of momentary understanding.
