God's Joke
"God's Joke" portrays my grandmother at 104, photographed in Poland on a summer day as she questioned why she was still alive. The title comes from how she used to describe herself. Through skin, gesture, and stillness, the series frames longevity not as gift but condition.
About Artist
Anna Nedlin
I am originally from Kraków, Poland, and for almost 30 years have divided my life between the United States and my grandmother's house in Poland. My practice explores how individuals inhabit time. Particularly when its expected limits begin to dissolve. I had photographed my grandmother for the last 25 years of her life. By the time I sat across from her at 104, the camera was not an intrusion but a continuation, one more sitting inside a relationship already shaped by looking. I was neither observer nor stranger. We were all living in the same house, moving through the same rooms. Alongside the portraits of my grandmother, I photograph my children, and at times, both of them together. Their presence, immediate and unburdened by what she was carrying, shaped how I thought about time and its accumulation. Moving between these bodies of work, I find myself inside the interval between a life not yet aware of its own duration and one that has outlasted its desire to continue. Through this tension, I aim to confront the viewer with death not as a distant abstraction, but as something that can feel delayed, uneven, and unresolved. I also photograph all else that compels me to look.
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