Little textured details that nobody notices. Shapes and colours and textures. Did I mention textures? Bialakura’s images are ripe with texture – crisp and soft, smooth and flaky, organic, hard, sharp and prickly; they invite you to touch.
bialakura – coral window
bialakura – green wooden wall
Agnieszka is a photographer, teacher, designer and mother of two, living and working in Warsaw. “‘Biala’ means white in Polish and ‘kura’ means hen, but it’s also a not-very-polite way to name a stay-at-home mum. I am a mum mostly working from home as a freelance designer and part time art teacher, so it was kind of a joke.”
She describes her aims in photography. “I’m looking for repetitive patterns and abstract compositions waiting for me in the real world. Sometimes it’s an architectural detail, sometimes it’s a nature close up. It’s a kind of game to find my pictures where everybody watches and nobody sees it.” She cites Ansel Adams as one of her enduring influences, and credits him with teaching her “how to take pictures I’m looking for.”
bialakura – ornamental hinge
She told me that when she was growing up, there was always a camera in the home somewhere, and her house was filled with photographs. She still has a lot of treasured old photos of her family. Her own image-making experiences started when she commenced study, and her grandmother gave Agnieszka her old Leica SLR. That camera went everywhere with her and later, she bought her own SLR. She still takes her camera everywhere, although it’s another one now with the arrival of the digital era and DSLR.
bialakura – blackthorn berries
She related to me her most devastating photography experience. It happened several years ago, and was quite traumatic. “I slipped and crushed my freshly bought camera – it was not the only one I have, but I had not made even one roll of film with it and it was totally destroyed.”
Despite the setback, she has picked herself up and carried on to bigger and better things, and was thrilled to see how far she had come when she presented her first solo exhibition of architectural photography almost 2 years ago.
bialakura – rosebud
Her best advice is something that she heard a while back. “Take pictures, take more pictures and take even more pictures. If you get one good one out of one hundred taken, then you are really good at it.”
You can find more of her images in her Etsy shop, bialakura.