Joanna Piotrowska’s Unsettling Photography Forcefully Confronts Hidden Violence

In Joanna Piotrowska’s strange and sometimes disturbing photography, individuals are often arranged in positions that appear uncannily familiar. They push at each others faces, as though locked in combat, or they are slung around or over one another, in tableaux that can feel intimate or slightly violent, depending on the setting. Her stark black-and-white pictures needle at the subconscious, drawing up unexpected associations having to do with the bizarre power dynamics that course everyd