Vanessa Kuzay creates an intimate and poetic narrative about the origins and the bond that is created between a mother and her child.
I knew so little about my grandmother. No family album, just a few scattered photos with my father as a child, a serious face with a sad gaze. A Slavic name.
As a mother myself, a stranger to this instinct considered to be natural and sacred, I needed to understand what was able to connect us across time and places.
So many times, I went to a Poland I often pictured harsh and violent, but also bucolic with flowers covering wooden houses, and stork’s nests in each village awaiting their exiled guests in an eternal cycle of departures and returns.
Following a ghost, I suddenly felt the warmth of a hand in mine. I saw this child playing, his laughter piercing dark forests. I heard his footsteps in family homes that were not ours. I observed his face, now and then melancholic, with pale blue eyes like mine, like my father’s and like those before us.
While a family memory was fading in a thick fog similar to a Polish winter, another story revealed. A family album was opening.
Vanessa has produced a book called Après les cigognes based on some of the images from this series.
The book is available from: https://editionsrevolues.fr/products/apres-les-cigognes
Vanessa Kuzay is a photographer based in Marseille who explores the connections between images, memory, and storytelling. Working exclusively with film photography, her work focuses on intimate narratives and places shaped by the lives they hold, tracing the silences and stories that images and spaces continue to carry.
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