text by Kirsten Andersen

Becoming
“I feel I have to do it.” — Agata Storer

A mother is many things all at once. In Becoming, the series of photographs from Agata Storer, these multiplicities appear like the stop-and-go rotation of a slide projector: image by image, one glimpses the psychological reach and cellular obsessions of motherhood. Storer has lived with her young family on three different continents in seven years— a peripatetic lifestyle that, while rich in freedom, has also augmented the anxieties of vulnerability and protection on view in Becoming. As the artist seeks to capture, then release, her own experiences through the lens of her medium format camera, she trains her gaze primarily on her young daughter Malina.

From Israel, to Poland, to Cape Cod and elsewhere, Malina proves a precocious muse. Unburdened by the conventions of most child portraits and the prescriptions to sit, to stand, to smile, Storer’s photographs of her daughter are largely realized with minimal choreography. Becoming’s images of Malina poolside; Malina tethered to a friend; Malina’s eyes covered by a pair of leaves; Malina backlit and shrouded in fishing net— the artist captures these moments as they occur. The yield is an unlikely combination of spontaneity and stillness, a series of images that gesture, with melancholy, to the impossibility of stopping time.

Storer’s photographs reveal their narratives of loneliness, beauty, and grief in images rich with atmosphere. Square by square, the viewer moves through portraits and places so visually resplendent they suggest single pieces of cinema. A sliced watermelon is rendered plump, halved, and human with exposure and pain. Observed geraniums through glass speak their sad truths about longing and the limitations of touch. Refracted light on tile casts a spell that seems just as bound to futility as it is to hope.

The artist has described her photography as a tool to establish boundaries, to find her footing. Where does a mother’s obsessive reach end and a child’s experience begin? How do we practice presence when every moment is eclipsed by time? Storer’s photographs comprise a mother’s life in long, ruthless gaze upon long, ruthless gaze. A young girl floats in pond waters. She’s huddled on the hood of a busted truck. The images in Becoming are a whorl of beauty and fascination that strike in plain sight before leaving, as they pass quickly by.