All stories – especially these commemorative, ordinary, personal – deserve to be told because apart from the point that they create our culture they also have their own unique individual value. This is evidenced by family photographs – preserved images of the most significant moments of life which are viewed alone as sentimental time travel or among the dearest people as part of cultivating tradition. What is common to all of them is that they serve to certify the feelings of each of us.

My doctoral work is an identity project about myself. But it is not so obvious. After ten years of photography studies I finally realized that all my photographs are always about exploring my own person. The name and surname which I have signed for all that period of my photographical work is not the one that is my official signature. I use it to present an image of the Paniak family, photographing myself in the manner of various classic family photographs or by being photographed by other photographers. All my photographs present me personally but me being in different roles – as my parents, as a young woman, as an elderly man, as a grandmother and as a grandfather or as a child, and sometimes just as myself. For me, it is a very individual try to understand my own identity by thinking about my image. And yet there is no representation without photography – it is through photography that we portray ourselves which is something undefined between the true and false way of depicting ourselves. To check this, I produce all my photos with the same methods that are known from the previous century and from modern times. It is also pointing out the essence of family photography, which throughout its existence has not been distinguished from other genres of photography. Photography as a medium that confirms reality, but at the same time creates conditions for free author’s commentary, is somewhere on the verge of being in the center of specialist’s attention and everyone’s ordinary domestic use. And it is precisely what is on the fringes of these two strategies that fascinates me the most.