bio Zuzanna Smolarkiewicz was born in Warsaw, Poland and came to the United States in 1981. She grew up outside of Boulder, Colorado. In 1998 she moved to Brooklyn, NY to attend Pratt Institute of Art where she received a BFA in Photography. In August of 2005 Zuzanna relocated to Salt Lake City where she is currently working towards her MFA degree at the University of Utah where she was awarded a Graduate Research Fellowship.

artist statement The examination of personal identity inevitably leads to questions - the most common of which is what enables the perpetuation of the self. What is necessary for some past or future being to be you? But there are other questions of equal interest and importance. Who am I? Am I myself because of my past, my present, or what I hope for in my future? Or does my identity emerge from my personal relationships with others, or through my personal environment and belongings? If I wake up at a different time, in a different place, could I wake up a different person? Through photographs, prints, and text, I examine identity, the relationships and bonds between people, individual experience within physical space, the drama of domestic lives, the modern roles of women, and the ideals of physical beauty. A common strand throughout all my work is the presence of narrative and nostalgia.

My photographs are predominantly portraits of individuals in my life who influence and nourish me emotionally. In 2005 I moved from the bright and noisy streets of New York City to the quiet and serene landscape of Salt Lake City. Moving across country immensely affected my work. I have taken my subjects out of the constructed stale and commercially lit environment of a studio and begun to photograph them using available light amidst the clutter of their own personal environments. Most recently I have begun examining the modern roles and identities of women by photographing myself as well as women I know in their own personal environments. I want to present intimate and quiet glimpses into their private lives and surroundings in order to address our differences as well as our similarities but especially our personal identities. What can we learn about an individual’s character from their personal surroundings? What does one’s domestic environment reveal about them as an individual? I have specifically chosen to photograph women I know in their kitchens. I want to take the statement “a woman’s place is in the kitchen” and see what that means for women today. Do we still embrace traditional domestic roles and what does that say about out personal identity?

I also have been continuously working on a serious of portraits of my close friends. These are shot with a point and shoot camera and are usually close ups of their faces. I shoot these images quickly in social settings, creating a voyeuristic and almost intrusive sense of space. I shoot on either slide film which I cross process to create dreamlike high contrast colors or with extremely grainy high-speed b&w film. I want these images to capture a singular select moment in my life with the subject, but also appear surreal and dreamlike. As I no longer have continuous physical contact with most of my close friends, I want the printed images to embody the sense of nostalgia and longing I feel towards the subjects.

I have also recently begun a body of work that focuses on the nostalgic American roadside motel. My immigrant father idealized the American West. As a child we would take yearly road trips visiting different American National Parks and Monuments. Most nights my parents would sleep in a small tent, and my brother and I would sleep in the back of our small hatchback Chevrolet, but some nights, we would stay at a cheap roadside motel. In this work I hope to address issues of my childhood memory, nostalgia, my feelings of displacement, and my inability to settle on a place I can call home. Is home a psychological place or a physical space? I examine identity because it is something I continuously question.