Ella Kowalska: Lost in the Multiverse.

My polish upbringing was marked by a culture that calls for absurdity and irrationality and sublimes the beauty and profoundness in the unreasonable and extravagant, both in the content and the form. Those questions can be found in dramatic arts, visual arts, or the prose and develop its apogee at the beginning of the XXth century (the Young Poland movement) searching in directions of symbolism, existentialism and expressionism. It’s in this distorted reality, which could sometimes seem more real than the reality itself, and in its astonishing connections that I always felt at home. The « Lost in the Multiverse » photography series is a fruit of that.

The series is aimed to study and explore the properties of light and the reflections. The photographs are taken through transparent but reflective surface, such as a window. This allows two spaces which theoretically can’t be seen at the same time by a human eye to coexist in the same frame: one space is the space that finds itself in front of the camera lens, and the other is the space that is outside of the lenses reach. Depending on the intensity of light, and it’s angle in the two spaces more or less of one or the other side is visible in the final image. The light and therefore the reflection that positions itself on the reflexive surface can be often blocked in some part by exterior elements (a light post, a trash can, a person…) this creates « holes » in the reflection and lets the mixing of the inside and outside go even further, and this goes for the mirrors inside as well (those can bring a second reflection into the already composite image). This makes the interpretation of the image even more intriguing. The elements of both, the inside and outside, blend together creating illusions of thing that could be, could exist sometimes. The final images offer something new – a new world, a new territory, and maybe a new universe. This is also why the framing is of the up most importance in the project – it’s there not only to show the glimpse of another world, but to find and capture all the beauty in the irrational.

If I think of reflections from the point of view of quantum physics I see them as a representation of impossible becoming possible. The particles that seem at their right place in our universe could assemble themselves in different way in a parallel universe and create something visually different. By pushing the boundaries of the post-production and therefore by creating an image that is almost homogenous I aim to stimulate the curiosity of the viewer who by looking at those photographs in small format has an insight of this universe as if through a keyhole and in big format can live it as an almost immersive experience.

This series inserts itself on my global work on reflections in street photography.