Becoming

Can a photograph—created with the intention of stopping time—reveal its continuity?
This question is explored by Kasia Dorocińska in her sensuous photographs presenting the contemporary figure of a dancing woman-maenad at the gallery of the Archeology of Photography Foundation.

Photography has long been understood as a medium that “freezes a moment,” “embalms time,” or even… “kills.” Over the years it has been burdened with a range of metaphors suggesting that the images it produces are immobile and lifeless. As a result, within culture it is rarely associated with the celebration of life. BECOMING, Kasia Dorocińska’s exhibition at the gallery of the Archeology of Photography Foundation, attempts to challenge this way of thinking by telling a story about process and the vital dimension of the photographic medium.

One of the conceptual foundations of the BECOMING series is the idea of élan vital, developed by one of the most important French philosophers of the twentieth century, Henri Bergson. As the artist explains:
“My inspiration comes primarily from my own observations and from Bergson’s philosophy, which saw reality as a dynamic, fluid process. According to him, life is not a collection of fixed facts but a creative force, an inner drive that propels being toward constant transformation.”

Yet engaging with this well-known philosophical theory within a photographic project requires reinterpreting it. After all, the French thinker himself cultivated the tradition of describing photography as a medium that petrifies reality. He often used photographic metaphors to point out the limits of human perception. Observing processes, he argued, we involuntarily produce mere “snapshots” of them—we divide them into separate points, much like in the nineteenth-century chronophotographs of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey. These images were sharp and depicted successive frozen phases of movement.

Kasia Dorocińska challenges this assumption by employing different photographic strategies and by trusting intuition—an approach that Bergson himself valued. Her photographs of the model are not austere, analytical studies of movement. Instead, they attempt to reach what is beyond rational explanation. They depict a contemporary incarnation of the mythological, dynamic maenad in an elusive and liberated dance.

Dorocińska works with images charged with vital energy. Her project seeks to reveal the often overlooked “performativity” of the medium, a concept discussed by another philosopher, Richard Shusterman, the founder of somaesthetics. Shusterman observed that when viewing photographs we focus too strongly on the static image, treating it as the only meaningful result. Yet a print or a digital photograph is merely one element of the broader practice of photography.

We tend to forget the process that precedes it: the experience of the world, the amalgam of emotions, and the physical work of both artist and model. We forget that images are perceived not only with our eyes but with our entire bodies. We overlook the materiality of photographs themselves, which change before our eyes. We forget that once seen, images continue to live their own lives within us.

And we forget that every moment is a continuous process of becoming.