Anna Gajewszky

From the project 'Mother don't you cry' by Anna Gajewszky

Biography

Instagram: annagajewszky

Anna Gajewszky (1997, Budapest) is a photographer based in Budapest. Her work is mainly focused on families and womanhood. Her deep and long-standing interest in personal issues is palpable throughout her work. The quality of relationships humans can form with each other, with themselves, their bodies, with animals or within a larger aspect, the land are central elements in her work. Her work was exhibited both in Budapest and internationally, she was published in the 2021 edition of Blurring the Lines, she received the national higher education excellence scholarship, her book was shown at Polycopies 2023 and she won the 2024 Breda Photo Festival.

The project

"I find it important that we look back to our personal and historical past in order to have a better understanding of ourselves and our surroundings. ​Mother Don’t You Cry is a series of 20 images based on childhood memories and reflections on family stories that formed my identity and the person who I am today. The title of the project refers to a Hungarian folk song, in which a mother is crying because her daughter is stepping into her new role in life as a wife and the daughter consoles her mother not to cry as this is the way of life. My family comes from two villages in Romania (Transylvania) in which the attachments to traditions and rituals are very strong and they served as important elements in my upbringing. In my work I rely on these traditions, the life of women who surrounded me, my memories and archive images but I believe that my images go beyond them and beyond me. My aim is to create a visual world that speaks about womanhood, family connections, generations and different rural traditions. Since I was a teenager people around me defined me as a strong girl and later as a strong woman. It became interesting for me the way these notions define us and our lives. As I began to read about the way our family, our childhood or even how our genetics form the way we are, I started to link several elements of my own functioning to the way my family deals with certain things in life. This process was then followed by taking the images and forming a visual world which contains mostly self portraits. I photograph myself in various situations. I play with the duality of fiction and reality and these images in some way are the documentations of my own life. They are not necessarily role plays, they share intimate elements of my life and they serve to talk openly about familiar connections, rural traditions, traumas and the struggles with femininity and identity. I believe there is a collective responsibility for every generation to reach back to their origins and learn about their family's history, because in some way quality of lives lived before us shape the quality of lives we live now."