Jagoda Wisniewska is a Polish, female photographer currently living and working in Lausanne, Switzerland.
In 2016 she graduated from Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne ECAL from a Master programme in Art Direction. In 2013 she completed the BA (Hons) Photography & Film studies in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her photographic practice focuses on the exploration of the physicality and fragmentary of the photographic medium. She often works around the subject of familiarity, the concept of loss, and photographic performativity. She’s fascinated with the subject of motherhood and the duality of family relationships. She explores ideas of performativity in portraiture, and she’s deeply interested in challenging the ideas of reality through photographic depictions. She’s fascinated with the photobook form and photo bookmaking, and the physical qualities of the photographic books that allow her to explore non-linear storytelling; through the endless possibilities of dialogs between the images. In her practice, she’s to explore the multilayered relationships between her subjects, but also her process and position as a photographer and the subjects she’s photographing.
About My Mother is a Hippie – words by Jagoda Wisniewska:
The figure of a mother is my long-lasting fascination. From holly Madonna to the post-modern Insta-mums, I am fascinated with the hunting stereotypes of the maternal love that should and is unconditional. Through the portraits in the series titled “My Mother is a Hippie” (2019), I explore the power and the failure of mother figures. What interests me lies within the duality behind the experience of motherhood; the constant forces of needing and wanting, dependency and confusion, happiness and despair. By photographing different women and their children, I try to work with different “masks” of motherhood, to challenge the visual representation of motherhood as a single-minded identity. I think that today, motherhood is being “rebranded”: from fashion, media faces, high profile figures, and influencers – women are leading a new dialogue about what it means and what it doesn’t mean to be a mother. Voices are being raised by women who openly talk about the dark sides of pregnancy and motherhood, claiming their right to be seen, to be tired, to be fed up with the social role of motherhood, etc. All social and psychological aspects linked with the mother-child relationship and the position of a woman within these aspects deeply fascinate me. Through this series I aim to challenge the well-known definitions of maternal figure and maternal love, presenting my subjects performing themselves in all types of forms on the photographs. I am intrigued by the power that mothers hold over their children. It is important to me to observe the deep codependence both sides have for each other, the diverse and opposing range of feelings between the subjects that I hope to show through my photographs.
