Irmina Walczak

A Polish photographer who studied Latin America Cultural Studies at Warsaw University and a PhD in Social Sciences at the University of Brasilia. Throughout the years, she had worked as a researcher in cultural politics evaluation, using the approach of ethnography and visual anthropology. In 2011, she turned her interest to photography itself and started exploring family relationships, intimacy and aspects of daily life. She frequently works with her life partner Sávio Freire. They study and successively deepen the condition of the child in contemporary society and its corporeality. They developed together a body of work about a childhood free of technology and close to nature, which was published in 2016 in Brazil under the name “Retratos pra Yayá”. Simultaneously, Irmina creates representations of herself as a mother and reflects on how motherhood is inscribed in the female body and how it shapes a mother’s identity. She was a finalist of the Meitar Award for Excellence in Photography (Israel 2020) and the LensCulture Portrait Award (USA 2016), as well as the winner of the Head On Portrait Prize (Australia 2018) and runner-up of the Revela-t 2021 (Spain, 2021).