The works by Antonina Gugala document the craftsmanship of the endangered portrait studios.
During the last Festival Images Vevey, a commercial space at the station, close to a now defunct Vevey photo studio, hosted the Antonina Gugala photo survey.
The visual artist surveyed his native Warsaw in search of these craft places dedicated to portraiture, here for a diploma certificate. The portrait is intended to be non-standardized, although it is done in a short time and without much originality in the framing. These photographers had to switch from film to digital to adapt to the new constraints of the Internet market.
The photo as a window
The work "focused on Mokotow, the central and largest district of the Polish capital, where I live. Many studios are in the immediate vicinity of my home and I have noticed that some are closing shop," says the image woman. This was the last moment to produce a kind of inventory of these places.
"It is the presence of photography as a focus of production and diffusion in urban architecture that first interested me. There is the will to look at the photo as a window, the way in which a reality is structured. The project is thus a way of documenting the windows or fronts of photo studios."
Bertrand Tappolet