* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Justyna Neryng is a multi-award winning fine art photographer from Poland. She spent much of her childhood playing with her father’s cameras and dark room while roaming the forests of Chelmsko on the Czech border. As an adult, a mother and an immigrant to Britain, her photography has flourished into a substantial body of portraiture. Perhaps the most evocative of her works are her exquisitely emotive self-portraits that seem to carry the dark spirit of the forest from her childhood as well as potently baring the scars of modern womanhood. They show vulnerability and intimate eroticism as well as deep sense of isolation and alienation. It is these portraits that have been most published and exhibited in both her Polish homeland and in the UK. Four years ago Justyna begun to collaborate with her daughter Nell on a project Childhood Lost. She is currently producing new works in her adopted home town of Hove, where she lives with her daughter.
Justyna explains the “Childhood Lost” series by saying, “it’s is an on-going autobiographical project, self-portraits just in a different body. Exploring the nature of portraiture and memory. I am producing a series of portraits that evoke ,characters that populate this world we know as childhood. A court of character’s from myths and dreams.The images are aesthetically inspired by portraiture from the Golden Age of Dutch painting.By drawing on paintings as inspiration I am hoping to give a timeless feel to the final images. Key to the project is the painstaking styling and prop building, which I am using to evoke these different persona played out by my daughter.”
"I came across Justyna’s photography only recently and it profoundly moved me. She draws on Dutch portraiture particularly in the Lost Childhood series in which Justyna and her young daughter collaborate, constructing self-portraits with meticulously fashioned costume and narratives they develop together. Neyrngs work is both beautiful and deeply personal whilst dealing with universal ideas of an elusive notion of childhood."
