Izabela Łapińska
Walking down a city. Catalogue.
Photography exhibition: 09.10.2015 – 08.11.2015
Ancien Cinéma café‐club
23 Grand Rue, L-9410 Vianden
Walking down a city
I photographed all the cities, having taken my camera out from my bag only one time on each occasion. I gave each city only one emotional exchange, one touch that was independent from the circumstances. It was my affectionate interaction with the confronted reality. Each city is different, while I embraced it with similar tenderness of image, with the same frame, texture, line, shape, stain, light and darkness.
The series "Walking down a city" is an intimate story told by photographs about a particular place and a register of a personal experience. The idea behind it was to take pictures in a limited period of time, offering no return and no reconsolidation of space. "Walking down a city" is a frozen moment and a short-lived emotion that is not rationally confirmed, analyzed or logically considered.
Izabela Łapińska
Walking down a city
Many cities may be hidden in one city: these are those mental cities of its residents and those concrete cities of construction workers, those still cities of objects and those cities of bodies in motion, those cities of one-time tactics and those of institutional strategies, those cities of nostalgic memories (...) and dozens and dozens of others. From all those dense narratives, mentioned by Ewa Rewers, Izabela Łapińska chooses only those that almost automatically reach her consciousness with those small traces: those turns of the streets, those spaced out chairs, those reflections in a window glass, those inscriptions on walls, those pieces of wet pavement, those gates etc. The artist collects those municipal trinkets with scrupulosity of a collector, while keeping with the principle of one image, one emotional exchange, no improvement, no waiting for a decisive moment. It is no hunting for the "essence of the event by Cartier-Bresson, but discovering the city's first layer early in the morning or late in the afternoon or whenever.
The hiking takes place in silence and solitude, as indicated by the abandoned places that are photographed. They remind us that forgotten scenography or, echoing Walter Benjamin, those murder scenes. But thanks to that emptiness that synthetic but yet emotional story allows at least to some extent discover a mysterious coexistence of those many cities in one city and capture their genius loci and feel the city with one's own body. Poddębice, Starachowice, Barcelona, Luxembourg put on us their roughness and weight, that metallic taste of industrial design, that lacy delicacy of texture or subtle transparency and lightness. Thanks to photographs of Łapińska we ‘read’ the details and fragments of a city, a city saturated with substance, with light and movement, a city that we accept or which we disapprove, but most importantly a city that we can ‘read’ over and over again in many different ways.
Malgorzata Jankowska
Bio
Izabela Łapińska
Professor of photography at the Visual Art Department at the National School of Film, Television and Theatre in Łodź and a graduate of that school. She also graduated from the University of Łódź from the culture studies department. She has had dozens of solo exhibitions both in Poland and abroad and numerous publications in, among the others, French, Belgian, Russian, Czech or Greek magazines. Her works were published in the Belgian house magazine "Objectif", in the French edition of the "PHOTO" and in the Polish magazines "Positive" and "Camera Obscura".
Her works are owned by private collectors from France, Austria, Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany, Australia and Argentina. She belongs to an artistic Group 0+ of Łódź. She also writes about photography, film and advertising, and more specifically on the subjects of eroticism, violence , abuse and exclusion in art.
Izabella Łapińska is also an associate professor at Łódź Film School.