Emanations
Beata Długosz used with great foundness paper disks for contact prints. From the very beginning of her independent artistic way she was fascinated by a photographic cuisine (sic!), she has been faithful to the analog photography with its exposure technology, first negatives, then papers, the chemistry of developers and fixers, and personal laboratory processing, all that that has become black (darkroom) magic to the new digital generation. Beata still celebrates the phenomenon of photosensitivity of certain materials, of blackening of surfaces touched by a beam of light, she investigates the effects of light dosages, recreates the drama of the primodial fight of light and darkness – cosmological conflicts – in the universe of the darkroom, in the enlarger. In an earlier cycle “Eos” Beata investigated the luminosity of circular patches, transparency or restricted light permealibility of various materials, brilliance tones of patches saved from darkening, from being absorbed by the darkness. She has given up the negative matrix, has been using simple stencils leaving sharp or smooth edges of the patches expoxed to the light flash of the lamp. In colour photographs she restricts herself to minimalistic variants of tinges obtained by exposing the paper to light of variagated hues.
At this exhibition Beata Długosz shows colourful almost abstract photographic paintings with a red circle in the centre. This circle was, in fact, a red jelly substance in a glass container. The object was photographed perpendicularly from above in various light conditions and looks like an ideal circle outlined by a thinner or a thicker border and placed against various backgrounds. This set of photographs is a variation on the theme of the red in its purely esthetic aspect with allusions to manifold painterly conventions, but they are not purely abstract paintings. One cannot forget that the red is the red of some liquid, disturbingly biological red filtering the light or absorbing it, mixing with the background colour, an intense red, blood-red, ruby, almost black, a sensual one or transforming itself into immaterial, pallid light provoking various symbolic associations.
Jan Bujnowski
Beata Długosz
- Beata Długosz
- Lives and works in Kraków, Poland. She is a member of the Association of Polish Art Photographers. She teaches photography at the Faculty of Art at the Pedagogical University in Krakow. In 2010 she obtained her PhD in Photography at the Film School in Łódź (PWSTiTV). In 2005 she was awarded a fellowship by the Mayor of the City of Krakow for her achievements in photography. Her works are part of the collection of Kraków’s Museum of Photography (MUFO) and the MOCAK Library collection. In 2014-15, she worked as the coordinator of the Main Program of the Krakow Photomonth Festival (MFK). Her work centres on such phenomena as emanation of light, the passage of time, photochemical processes. She works, mainly in traditional black-and-white photography techniques, makes experiments in camera-less photography, as well as site-speccific art installations. In recent years, her works have become critical of the current reality.
