Marie Tomanova’s diaristic tackle a 12 months

Deciding to {photograph} herself day by day for a 12 months, Marie Tomanova launched into a journey that grew to become a revelation

Inside Harkawik gallery in New York, there are 344 polaroids of Marie Tomanova in her totally different varieties – wanting on the digital camera along with her eyes vast, crossing her arms over the again of her head, posing like a competing bodybuilder. Sometimes she’s standing in her front room, sitting on a chair in a resort room carrying nothing, or mendacity round on carpeted flooring. Most of the time she’s bare, snug in her personal pores and skin, twisting her physique with grace and making it her versatile, transferring canvas.

The New York-based, Czech photographer took these photos day by day all through 2022, apart from a couple of weeks in July – a tumultuous, incomprehensible interval which grew to become the title of the present. Three Empty Weeks in July is by far Marie Tomanova’s most intensive self-portrait venture, paying homage to the works of Nan Goldin, Melissa Shook, Friedl Kubelka, and Yurie Nagashima. In our interview, Tomanova says that the venture isn’t about documenting herself day by day. “It’s about coming to terms with the fact that I don’t really know who I am,” she tells BJP. “I think that’s beautiful because it opens up so much more to explore, experiment, and shift.”

It’s additionally about reconnecting along with her inventive aspect. In 2021, she was publishing two monographs, engaged on totally different exhibitions in a number of locations (together with Rencontres d’Arles), dealing with her personal logistics and legalities, and coping with emails, numerous them. She skilled burnout and felt programmed to work as a substitute of being free and artistic. She wished to resurrect her explorative, playful self once more, so she had this “romantic idea” – her phrases – that the next 12 months, she would {photograph} herself day by day with prompt movie, regardless of the place she was or what she was doing. Off she went at the beginning of 2022. In January, she turned her one-bedroom flat and kitchen into a short lived studio and captured basic portrait pictures and double exposures of herself.

“February was nice, then March started to feel a little stickier. I thought, what am I going to do in the same place again, the same one-bedroom flat?” she puzzled, so she began travelling, “and it picked up nicely in April, May, and June.” Sometimes Tomanova used her tripod; different instances, she used a desk, a chair, a window, or no matter was round to place her Polaroid on. For half of the 12 months, her photos are up-close, lighthearted, and reserved when she folded her physique, hiding her bareness from the lens. Flowers recur within the portraits, visualising her blossomed femininity, and between May and June, her polaroids take us to Italy and France – in palazzos, round lavender fields, in entrance of closed outlets, on bridges, subsequent to marble statues.