Monika Czosnowska

Her photos of children, young people and young adults, taken as bust, half length or three-quarter length formats, and showing them sitting or standing before a neutral background, seem to have been influenced by portrait paintings in previous centuries, a factor which has been pointed out on several occasions.[5] The clearest example is surely her portrait of “Larissa” (Title photo, Ill. 9) from the series of “Novices” taken in 2004: the seated pose, and the clothes, the direction in which she is looking and even some parts of her physiognomy like the nose and mouth seem to have been inspired by the famous picture by Jan Vermeer (1632-1675), entitled “Girl with a Pearl Earring” (ca. 1665, Mauritshuis, The Hague). This is partly accidental, because the habit worn by the novice in the photograph in a Polish monastery – and of course her appearance – are authentic. In an interview Czosnowska explained that she had not staged her photograph consciously: “From the very start I never intended to photograph Larissa in the pose of the “Girl with a Pearl Earring”. But Jan Vermeer is one of my favourite painters and I think that the novice's bonnet may have provided me with some inspiration for the photo. It may also be the fact that I then [later] selected the photograph on the grounds of the composition”.[6]

There are no further congruences in her photographic portraits to any of the other thirty-seven known paintings by Vermeer, but there are similarities to other early paintings. The startling hairstyle, the position of the head and the hands in the broad sleeves in the photograph entitled “Monika” (Ill. 1) – the earliest portrait taken in 2001 from Czosnowska's series of individuals – resembles the painting “The Woman’s Window (La Donna della Finestra)” (1879, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA) made by the British symbolist, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882). “Clara” (2007. Ill. 8) seems to have been modelled on this picture with the difference that the photograph shows her with a twig of ivy, whereas Rossetti has arranged peonies on both sides of his subject. Paintings by another symbolist,  John Everett Millais (1829-1896), like the “Bridesmaid” (1851, Fitzwilliam-Museum, Cambridge) and “The Martyr of the Solway” (1871, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) might also have come into question as models. Millais' “Sweetest eyes that were ever seen” (1881, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh) is somewhat similar to Czosnowska's “Lea” (Ill. 45) in her series of “Elites” taken in 2017: in particular the direction of the gaze, her hair, her posture and the way she holds her arm.