Memory work.

Photography has always interested me in its diversity of aspects. On the one hand, photography documents reality. Photos are a testimony, because they record a fragment of history and they constitute the concretization of events from the past. On the other hand, photography creates a picture of the state of affairs. Photos are a worldview, because they comment on the existing situation and they are an interpretation of what happened. How do both these features – documentary and creational – combine with family photography? Does family photography present the image of the family, or does it modify it in some respects? And how does it work in the Paniak family?

The photographs of the Paniak family raise the issue of truth and falsity in family photography. My doctoral dissertation, based on the example of a family associated with me personally in a special way, deals with common tendencies in family photography. It is, in part, a thesis about my own identity experience and, in part, about each of us in the context of family photography.