Monika Czosnowska

In order to achieve this effect and to push the personality of her subjects into the background, she selects her models from groups with the same sort of clothing like school uniforms, surplices (Ill. 18-27), monastery habits, scout and guide uniforms (Ill. 28-39), and sporting gear. She dresses persons she finds on the street in clothes taken from her wardrobe at home; these are preferably somewhat out of date, and in the case of an emergency she uses a neutral shirt or blouse. As in older portrait paintings her models not only gaze beyond the viewer, they are also restrained, uninvolved and introverted. Adults are able to turn their gaze inwards when they are considering something carefully or do not wish to intrude too much on the people they are talking to, but with children this is more difficult to do. Czosnowska solves this by asking her subjects to repeat a multiplication table to themselves in their heads. The introverted gaze plays a particular role in her series of “Novices”. It is given an additional concision by the occasionally audacious and occasionally humble bent of the heads as in “Adrian” (Ill. 11), “Agnes” (Ill. 15) and “Justus” (Ill. 16). In painting we can find this sort of look primarily in the faces of Saints, and in the late 19th century in popular chromolithographs that were used for pictures of saints and mural prints of family idylls particularly in Catholic regions.[9]  It might also be the case that Czosnowska's childhood impressions derive from there.

She works with a Pentax medium format camera, analogue Kodak films and takes her photographs exclusively in daylight shining from the front, thereby lighting up the faces uniformly. She says that this makes her work softer, perhaps even more painterly. She prints her pictures herself in professional laboratories where she is able to have a direct influence on the quality of the colours and the contrast between light and dark, possibly all the way to “a touch of idealism”. Finally she changes the names of the people she portrays and gives them first names that “have nothing to do with fashion and which condense the photographs to a final valid image.” All the individual characteristics and phases of the design – the choice of models, their physiognomy, expression, poise and pose, the direction in which they look, their clothes, the lighting and finally her printing technique – contribute to the expression and effectiveness of every individual portrait. “I stage my photographic work in order to attain precisely the expression I am looking for.“[10]

Of course, this throws up the question as to whether her images are strictly speaking portraits, i.e. renderings of specific persons, or rather more generally valid images of the human condition. As art academics used to say, the conventional definition of a portrait or an image is “a picture of a person that reflects a certain personality”, (Percy Ernst Schramm). The decisive factor here is, according to the Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte, “the presentation of a specific person, not the degree of similarity, that can only be attained at specific times and with limitations”.[11]