Anna Ajtner
I started my education in this field in the years 1989 – 1993 at the State High School of Fine Arts in Bydgoszcz (Poland) and I gained there the title of technician of art, with the specialty of arranging exhibitions. In the years 1993 – 1998 I studied artistic pedagogy at the Fine Arts Faculty of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun (Poland). There I graduated and I got my Master’s Degree in painting in 1998. After the graduation I developed my artistic activity in the fields of painting, photography and video.
About my photography:
My photography is a series of portraits of my 8 years old daughter - Sandra. This is a project, which I have continued since 2012. Daughter is the main theme of my work - she is my inspiration. Her childhood, how she grows up, her beauty - how it have changed, her emotional states, her surroundings. This all have an impact on the final effect of my photographs. At the end - it is also capturing our relationship / mother - daughter /. It’s a
documentary and artistic creation. In our cadres people can feel / I hope / - in what way the world affects our emotions.
This is our story. Most of my photography is a black and white shots but also you can find colorful accents. Each of the works of this series may also be considered as a separate work.
Exhibitions: 2012 - BWA Bydgoszcz Poligonum
2012 - Polish Art Festival Limerick 2012 -FineLife Warszawa 2012 - Galeria ZPAF Warszawa
2013 Series exhibitions : Through a Mother’s Eyes 2013 FOTOFEVER Paris WERKDRUCK
Contests: ScanDisk, Panasonic, National Geographic. Publications: The Imaginatium, FullFrame, LensFolio, PhotoVogue, Adore Noir Magazine, SHOT Magazine, Books: WERKDRUCK No.43 - Galerie Vevais Berlin
WERKDRUCK No. 43 - Anna Ajtner Editor: Jock Sturges, Galerie Vevais - Berlin - Publisher - Alexander Scholz
Anna Ajtner
One of the things that draws me to a new artist is evidence of something I think of as creative frenzy. An artist thus engaged resembles nothing quite so much as a pot vigorously boiling over. When this is evident over a long time-span it becomes clear that the work owns the artist as opposed to the artist being in control. In the worst of cases this phenomenon can be exhausting and pernicious, but, in the best, transcendent and joyful. What’s most important though is that in such cases the sheer volume of the work so practices the hand and the eye and heart behind, that the work inevitably becomes more and more refined. This elevates the effort to a rare degree.
Anna is such a one – joyful and passionate. I’ve been aware of her work for several years now and I realized early on that her photography owned her completely. She produces new images in volume almost every single day and often posts them only lightly edited. Thus the structure of her shoots and the thought processes behind them and the models’ evolving participation in each of them are there to see – interesting reading in every case.
Anna was educated in the State High School of Fine Arts in Bydgoszcz, Poland with an emphasis on curatorial sciences. She went on to receive a masters degree in painting at the Fine Arts
Faculty of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland. She has since pursued a career organizing and curating art exhibits (including her own) and teaching art and photography to all ages of children.
Importantly, three years after the birth of her second child, the family moved to a very rural area in central western Poland. This pastoral context was perfect for raising children and for photographing them as well. It is thus no surprise that in a number of her pictures we see her daughter appearing to have sunk into and almost become part of the earth. Her beauty and the natural world that surrounds and supports her resonate with an other-worldy harmony.
Annaʼs images are intimate, playful, passionate and relentlessly beautiful – as fine a collaboration as I have seen in some time. I have every suspicion that this small book is just the first in a continuing series. Here the story begins but there is so much more to come.
Jock Sturges Antwerpen, 2014