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Piotr Karpinski – Three Project Feature
Piotr Karpinski
“The people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned”.
Matthew 4:16 Isaiah 9:1,2
General statement:
My work is about Life and Death. What is always behind the image is a thought. Thoughts behind my photographs are my fascinations, fears and concerns related to existence and its ending. I use photography to record these. I am interested in Memento mori theme in visual art. Thinking of Time and its destructive powers is what drives my practice and shapes my ideas. I explore the notions of “never”, “forever” and “always”. Those matters are complicated and beyond our full understanding. I barely know any answers myself. I feel more comfortable asking questions rather than giving answers when photographing.
Series of portraitures consisting of 3 chapters:
1-Let’s Talk about Life & Death Darling,
2-Immortals,
3-Post Mortem Home Visits.
When working on the 1st picture of “Let’s Talk about Life & Death Darling” I had Ingmar Bergman, one of my masters, in mind. Watching his “Seventh Seal” was a primary inspiration and a starting point of bringing this series to life. How to picture Death? Bergman’s way of doing that pushed me to search for my own response. It started as a fiction fed on my fascinations and fears. The project developed from fiction towards photographing the darker part of reality around me when Death knocked on the doors of my own home. Death stepped into my fictional stories and ruled the last two pictures of the series and opened chapter 3 “Post Mortem Home Visits”. 5 works are titled “Woman in the Church No.1” with numbers 0-4.
“Immortals” is inspired by the theme of a Baby Jesus Sleeping developed in iconography during the 17th century. The counterpoint between the beginning and the end of life was then bound together with the theme of Vanitas. The sleep of the infant Jesus symbolized the sleep of death and prefigured his future death and martyrdom. My approach is a reference to both a future death as well as the state of being unconscious to mortality issues in the early years of childhood. Their sleep is a symbol of their unawareness. I was photographing toddlers at the age when they start to understand what life is about, yet feeling immortal thanks to the comfortable unfamiliarity with mortal matters- I find this phenomenon fascinating.
“Post Mortem Home Visits“ is as follows: ”It’s January 2018. Just after first Christmas without him. Around 7 months after his death”.
“Death No.1”
This selection of photographs depicts flowers left over on graves, captured relatively soon after funeral ceremonies.
I am interested in Memento mori theme in visual art. Thinking of time and its destructive powers was a starting point of working on this project. I created a series of photographs exploring symbols of flowers in a direct context of a Human Death. The fragility of life and passing time can be easily observed when having a flower as an object. I decided to photograph this object in a particular set of circumstances related to Death. Many photographs of this series were taken after it rained- water is one of the life symbols too. This series explores my fascinations with “never”, “forever” and “always”. This project is not solely about Death and Time but about Life and Love as well.
