241 - Agnieszka Sosnowska

A Small Voice: Conversations With Photographers

Agnieszka Sosnowska was born in Warsaw, Poland and was raised in Boston, Massachusetts. She earned a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and a MFA from Boston University. She is currently an elementary school teacher. She lives on farm
in East Iceland. She is recognised for her self portraits that span 30 years. Currently she is working on series that embodies her life as an immigrant in Iceland. She uses the camera to take inspiration from a land that is otherworldly.

“I grew up in Boston and traveled to Iceland 25 years ago on a whim”, says Agnieszka. “I fell in love and remained. With my Icelandic husband I chose to live in nature, not visit it. This decision has not been without tests. Together we have made a life that I feel we are only beginning. Everyday, I search for corners of quiet. When there, I stop and listen for a long time. These places exist around our farm, with friends, and the students I teach. These places are my everyday. They are my everything.”

Agnieszka has been the recipient of a number of grants, including a Fulbright Scholars Fellowship to Poland and an American Scandinavian Fellowship to Iceland. She was awarded the Hjálmar R. Bárðarson Photography Grant by the National Museum of Iceland. Her series was awarded the Director’s Choice by the Center awards in 2017 and she has been in the Top 50 of Critical Mass on three occasions. Her work has been exhibited in the National Museum of Iceland and the Reykjavik Museum of Photography. She is represented exclusively by Vision Neil Folberg Gallery in Jerusalem.

Earlier this year, Agnieszka released her debut photobook, För, published by Trespasser Books and already sold out.

Her collaboration with Icelandic poet Ingunn Snædal, entitled RASK, is currently being exhibited at the Reykjavik Museum of Photography until Decembet 2024.

In episode 241, Agnieszka discusses, among other things:

• Early years travelling to Communist Poland
• Wanting to assimilate into the USA as an immigrant
• Early education in photography at Mass. Art
• Her early interest in self-portraiture
• Not having a plan… but being a hard worker
• The trip to Iceland that changed her life…
• …and her decision to move there
• A description of where she lives
• The hardest thing to adapt to being the Winters
• The first things she started to photograph there
• Self-portaiture and the suckiness of documenting ageing
• The freedom of realising that you don’t have to work on distinct ‘projects’
• ‘Myth of a Woman’ - her attempt at exploring the experience of womanhood
• Collaborating with her students on portrait sessions
• The last picture in the book
• Her collaboration with Icelandic poet Ingunn Snædal, RASK, currently an exhibition at the Reykjavik Museum of Photography

Referenced:

• Cindy Sherman
• Margaret Johnson
• Laura McPhee
• Ingunn Snædal
• Barbara Bosworth

Website | Instagram

“I wanted to grow. I just didn’t know how. And I think the only way you grow is not by thinking about it but by doing it and making the mistakes. And I made a lot of mistakes. And thank God I did because in doing the mistakes I started to get more to having the self-portraits be more real. And that’s really hard to do. Especially I think as me having done it for so long, and also getting older in front of a camera, as a woman, it’s hard.”

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