In this photographic series, executed using the traditional analogue technique, Aneta Grzeszykowska painted her body black to obtain a bright positive image of herself on the negative. Presenting arranged scenes from everyday life in this way, she plays not only with the conventions of photographic techniques and their history, but also with the cultural associations around “negative” and “positive”—a dualistic vision of the world organized by opposites.

Grzeszykowska’s depictions in domestic situations—in the shower, in the bathtub, with her daughter—take on a disturbing, surreal character. The photographs also document performances, which are no less important than the resulting material objects. As she explained in an interview: “It’s a series of photos, but for me it’s quite obvious that it’s a performance, and what I present in the gallery is the result of this performance. Some people say that if you realize ‘how it’s done,’ the whole magic is gone. But for me, the meaning of this work lies, among other things, in the clash between an absurd action and the final outcome. My works are tragicomedies in this sense.”

The negative and the positive bring to mind conflicts in a polarized society, the duality of the human soul and personality. While the negative is hidden from view in standard analogue photography, Grzeszykowska reverses this order, playing with viewers’ expectations. Negative Book is one of several projects in which the artist negotiates and processes the conventions of portrait, private, and family photography, and the ways it is used to assert identity. In other photographic series she enacts its simultaneous construction and deconstruction. In Album, the artist removed her image from family photos, in Untitled Film Stills, she reconstructed photographs to impersonate someone else, while in Negative Book (in the MSN collection), she sought to be herself through negation.

[J.G.]