In many the term "photography" evokes more than just a little emotion, and not surprisingly. After all only something exciting, and therefore uncommon events and unusual subjects, deserves a click of the shutter. Even the average tourist equipped with a cheap disposable camera only steers the lens towards breath-taking views. This is the most beautiful beach X on island Y. This is the oldest building A in town B. This is me at the back of building A and on beach X. I have never been there before and most certainly will never go there again, I therefore preserve forever events, which are special in every way.

This understanding of the term "photography" is somehow in line with that presented by press photography. Take for example the first and best newspaper: pictures of some colossal disaster leap out from among the headlines. Immediately after that there are photos of spectacular successes. Here and there we find portraits of the famous in huge dimensions, although they were only meant to be famous for fifteen minutes. There are up-and-coming and fading movie stars, politicians, mass murderers, and pedigree animals reaping all the prizes at all the pedigree animal shows. Ba! If we look closely we also find pictures of the oldest building in town B and beaches on island X, the same ones we made eternal for our domestic photo album, and here you are, how are ours worse than those in the newspaper?

To summarize: from our own experience of amateur photographers and readers of daily newspapers we begin to form our own beliefs about what photography should be and to what it should relate; that it is the task of photography to immortalize all extraordinary things for the sake of the mundane human being and his daily routine.

In this context Magda's photographs look colourless. Nothing is actually happening here. Some man has fallen asleep next to a bottle of whisky. Some woman smoking a cigarette is staring at her reflection in the mirror. Some girl, photographed from the side, is smiling at someone. And that is all, really. We do not know who the man snoring in the bar is, who the smoker with her hair in curlpapers, or the smiling girl is. Who is she smiling at? What amused her like that? This is not in the shot. The unusual, spectacular, and extraordinary was not worth the photographer's attention.

To add to the evil this is all photographed in a strange, quite dreamy style, on black and white film, as if someone wanted to save money on colour pictures. Slightly blurred outlines, as if the photographer did not know how to focus properly. Some pictures are foggy, while you can say anything about the people, except that they are beautiful. They are too normal to be beautiful. Or let's take flowers, because they are on some of the photographs - here their natural colours only become shades of grey. At the same time they lose much of their natural beauty, but do they gain something in return?

Exactly. When we look at Magda's pictures, horrified, that they do not take us to the world of colourful fairy stories of the beautiful, famous, rich and colourful, when we begin to get angry that there is so much normality, when we want to look away, we ask ourselves, what do we gain in return? Do a lack of colour, focus, and quite surprising frame composition give us something we will not find in all those spectacular photographs of which the newspapers and albums are full?

In portrait photography the most difficult thing to do is to capture the moment at which the subject ceases to pose. I do not remember where I read that and who said that, but it comes back to me whenever I look at Magda's pictures. Then I always think to myself that someone really knew what they were doing, just as Magda knows her profession. This is because the people who look at us from her photographs, appear privately. They exist privately, for themselves only, not for photography, not for the final effect, which is meant to enlighten the viewer. After all we all want to look as beautiful as we can at that moment, to look just as captivating as a star actress, just as impressive as a statesman, and in the end everyone pretends to be someone for a while. But on Magda's photos, human faces have been miraculously stripped of that artificial mask that we put on for the purpose of the lens. They are real.

Only very few photographers manage to achieve this. It requires a great deal of concentration and the ability to meet the high expectations of the models themselves, as well as the potential viewers, among whom each has his own understanding of what the truth is. Those who pose usually expect their ideas about themselves to be confirmed, and those who view would like to see something they haven't seen before. Both types of people of people may feel let down by the final product. The person photographed demands the "real" him or her, i.e. such as he/she is able to accept, while the viewer would like to see something "truly interesting" and therefore extraordinary, and therefore, paradoxically, not real.

But if however we are able to forget about those expectations, or at least to some extent put them aside, Magda's photographs create a rare opportunity for us. We see people who smile, smoke cigarettes, sleep, yawn, talk, point to something with their fingers, or, only, and as much as, look into the lens, or somewhere beyond it, and for that instant they do not seek our acknowledgement. They do not try to fool us, to be liked, to sell themselves. They simply exist. Happy or sad, pretty, or so-so. Our judgements and assessments are not their business, they care nothing for them, they are beyond that.

I do not know whether Magda's photos will ever be used in encyclopaedias of the history of photography. Frankly I this is not my goal. I don't think it's the photographer's goal either, as she has been consistently wading through unfashionable, not very glamorous, unfocused photography of ordinary people. If she had been eager to make it her career she would probably have pointed her lens somewhere else.

But I do know that blurred, black and white photographs that do not come across very well if they have something that makes it hard to take your eyes off them, which makes us remember certain frames for years. They manage to catch the moment with all of its transistorises. Who knows, maybe because they are not in focus? As blurred as those boundaries, which divide one instant from the next, and one gesture from the next. As out of focus as everything that does not fall neatly into the dichotomy of "pretty-ugly", "interesting-not interesting", "important-unimportant", in the same way as those photographs, which, although black and white, in fact were created from all the shades of grey.

Jakub Janiszewski
Warsaw, August 26th, 2004