Jagoda Wisniewska is a Polish photographer and photo book maker currently living and working in Switzerland. Jagoda holds honors diploma from Photography & Film studies that she completed in Edinburgh, Scotland in 2013. She continued her studies completing a Master Degree in Art Direction at ECAL with the supervision of Milo Keller, Linus Bill and Bruno Ceschel in 2016. Jagoda’s interest in photographic book forms and nonlinear storytelling characterizes her identity as a photographer. She works focusing on the book form, exploring multiple possibilities of dialogs between images. Jagoda’s practice examines fragments of the photographic medium, concepts of loss and photographic preservation. She is fascinated by photography’s ability to reveal and to hide, to preserve or lose through image taking, and photography’s ability to express universal stories; asking questions, finding our own answers and constructing one’s awareness.
About ‘Never. Rarely.’:
How often are you distracted by activities or noises around you? How often do you feel fidgety? How often do you appear restless inside even when sitting still? How often are you forgetful in your daily activities?
ADD – Attention Deficit Disorder is one of the type of more commonly known ADHD that characterizes in chronic attention difficulty, hyperactivity and impulsiveness. It often begins in childhood and it can persist into adulthood. It may contribute to low self-esteem, troubled relationships, difficulty at school or work and problems with focus, distraction, and attention. These challenges are ongoing and are undermining the best intentions in many areas of life.
In ‘Never. Rarely.’, we take a photographic journey through a state of mind, a visual journey towards nowhere in particular, an investigation of one’s attention (or lack of it?), where ADD acts as a guide to seeing, noticing and finally connecting.
I am interested in the general idea of connectivity; looking for ways to stay connected (with oneself and with the here and now). Through this series of photographs, represented in the form of a photographic book, I wanted to literally re-connect, connect and disconnect on personal and universal levels through means of photography. My aim was to try to reach a level of comfort (through visual language and text), and to provide a similar sense to the viewer.
This visual trip is guided by the Adult ADHD/ADD Self-Report Scale, a kind of self- test, that is a certified medical method for self-diagnosis. As a tale of walking through different survey questions, each “chapter” starts with a statement and ends with a confirmation.
As humans, we constantly aim to progress and overcome ourselves in order to perform better and faster in the ever-changing, technology and image-driven world. The number of things that happen around us, the load of information, people and encounters, things that appear and disappear, things that have an impact on us are overwhelming. Why am I looking at that person? What is worth stopping for? How does an image speak to another image? What is it saying to me? In this state of mind, photography becomes a way to digest and to make sense of the visual information I receive. The series of images in ‘Never. Rarely.’ aim to show the sample of the mental health issues western societies deal with. This issue is often unspoken and undiscussed despite being a common problem amongst young and well-educated people.
‘Never. Rarely.’ takes a bitter-sweet approach on the often troubling reality. Through the set of photographs and text, I aim to comment on feelings such as confusion, feeling of disconnection, sense of belonging and displacement, being lost but not being able to fully acknowledge it. Through the fragmentary qualities of the photographic medium, I aimed to challenge the narration of the images. I am really interested in editing and sequencing photographs, in constructing new readings and interpretations through my images. The process of editing my photographs plays an active role in building the final reading of my project. It also stands for the idea of connectivity that photography as a medium allows to manifest at every stage of creating.
