Name: Joanna Piotrowska. FROWST. MACK, 2014.
Availability: InStock

Published by MACK in June 2014, FROWST is the first book by Polish photographer Joanna Piotrowska, made shortly after she completed her MA at the Royal College of Art in London. The book won the MACK First Book Award the same year. Across twenty-eight black-and-white plates, Piotrowska photographs members of her own family in carefully staged poses, asking them to re-enact moments of intimacy that had originally happened spontaneously. The result reads as part family album, part performance, part diagnostic record. The conceptual scaffolding comes from Bert Hellinger, the German psychotherapist whose Family Constellations method attempts to surface and resolve multi-generational trauma through physical positioning of family members in space. Piotrowska absorbed Hellinger's gestures into the photographs. Two adult brothers lying together on a Persian carpet in white briefs. Two women in black, embracing until their bodies merge. The title itself, FROWST, is an English word for a warm and stuffy atmosphere. The book opens with a line from Kafka's Letter to His Father. Forty-eight pages, hardcover, twenty-eight tritone plates, 23.5 by 26.5 cm. Designed by Joanna Piotrowska with Grégoire Pujade-Lauraine. ISBN 978-1-910164-10-5. Out of print at the publisher and increasingly difficult to find at original retail. Sourced for M.I.G. by Paris Image Unlimited as part of a thirty-three-title curation of rare art, photography, and design books. A reference for anyone tracking contemporary staged photography, the photobook as award-winning artistic format, or the long line of work that treats family as material rather than subject.