Magdalena Wosinska doesn't take photographs from a distance. She has always been inside the moment: camera on shoulder, camera in hand, present the way only someone who found belonging through a lens can be. When she moved from communist Poland to America in 1991 as a child, she found skateboarding first, then photography, then a parallel life as a guitarist in the metal band Green and Wood for eight years. They were all different versions of the same thing: a reason to be somewhere, a way to connect.
Her commercial work spans Vogue, Harley-Davidson, American Express, Wrangler, Levi's, and portraits of Joaquin Phoenix, George Clooney, Jane Goodall, David Lynch, and Alanis Morissette, among many others. She has achieved global recognition in her field. But the body of work that defines this particular conversation is more personal than any of that: her photographs of her mother.
Her mother had a stroke. Her voice became monotone, paralysis spread to one side of her face. She began to forget things in the present but remembered the past with strange clarity, fragments of childhood surfacing unbidden. And then she wrote a 76-page memoir, Childhood in Red, which Magdalena had translated into English a few months before this conversation. She intends to make a feature film from it.
