(click image for more details)End Part Series No. 23, 2006
Archival Digital C-Type Print
40cm x 36.5cm
Though her compositions are sometimes 'assisted', Penny Klepuszewska's photographs are firmly rooted within the documentary tradition. However, they manage to transcend the limitations sometimes associated with this genre and have a power beyond that of the purely reportage. Whilst fully engaged with the formal concerns of still life and portraiture her images hover somewhere around the margins, a position that is in line with the lives of the people who are her main subjects.
Her photographs zoom in on the ephemera of everyday lives, depicting vacated spaces and their clearance. Though she sometimes includes the human figure – albeit usually only in a detached and impersonal manner – her main focus is on the small, and to anyone else insignificant, things that are the markers of our personalities.
A pair of spectacles, a bed sheet, bare coat hangers in an empty wardrobe, a portrait of Jesus peering from a cardboard box: all are signifiers of dependence, reliance and faith that we need to get through life.
By honing in on these small and commonplace details Klepuszewska manages to invoke poignant portrayals of the human condition, our vulnerability and need for other things and people to give us strength and ward off loneliness.
Paul Stone, 2008
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find out more about Paul Stone
