NUANCES oƒ LIFE
Photographer Pola Esther explores aging, femininity, sexuality at Lyman Allyn
It’s only through photographer Pola Esther’s uncanny but endearing world view that images of an aging woman’s neck could pair so well with another of raw bacon strips; or that seemingly innocuous Styrofoam pink egg cartons with packing peanuts could convey feelings reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”; or that images of cucumbers, or partially eaten apples sitting atop pink fuzz, could stir earliest memories of a budding sexuality.
These are just a few of the observations that may come to mind while roaming through the Lyman Allyn Art Museum’s newest photography exhibition, “Pola Esther: Eggs to Apples” — a show that invites viewers to luxuriate in the subliminal messages of its 37 photographs, while also presenting a sort of all-encompassing visual poem.
Situated around the museum’s Glassenberg Gallery, Esther has created an elegant and feminine exploration into the cycles of life and death that affect us all.
Ripe and aging fruit, as well as prepubescent and aging females, permeate the show. But it’s Esther’s genius combinations of these muses with inanimate objects, along with her use of colors and textures throughout these photographs, that bring viewers into an alternate reality, beckoning them to explore the inner recesses of their minds.
A silky, baby-pink material set as the background for one photo triptych may bring up memories of childhood Easters, for example. Or aging bananas paired with a prickly flower set against a copper-toned velvet may comment on the beauty of life’s guaranteed aging process. A half-bitten pickle laying on the hood of a blue car next to bright-pink Azalea flowers, as another example, might delicately hint at the more hidden aspects of our sexuality — an ode, really, to the tangible aspects that shape life itself.
Born and raised in Lodz, Poland, Esther moved to the United States in the mid-’00s to pursue a summer internship in the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s prop department while also coming to live closer to her American boyfriend, a graduate of Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts. She now lives between homes in Old Lyme and New York City.
But it was because of her childhood in Poland, a country heavily influenced by the Roman Catholic Church and the former Soviet Union, that’s shaped her unique photography aesthetic, which is both cinematic and poetic, with a slight Soviet kitsch.
She likes to openly recount that, as a child, she was spiritually kissed by Pope John Paul II when she received her first communion from him — a significant moment, she says, that has not escaped her and has subsequently shaped and blessed her.
“It was a wonderful thing, and I am very thankful for this presence in my life,” she says, while also explaining that the rituals and processions of the Catholic Church fascinated her.
“When I was younger, I loved to participate in every church event. I loved to be on the altar, I loved to say the rosary out loud, I loved walking the procession and throwing the flowers,” Esther says. “There was something about all that that has stayed with me and influenced my personal style.”
And growing up in an artistically inclined city such as Lodz, where directors such as Roman Polanski and Krzysztof Kieślowski studied film, has also had a profound effect on the artist, allowing her to appreciate a certain aesthetic typically found in film. As a result, her photographs reflect such sensibilities.
Esther only began dabbling in photography around 2008, when a career in theater wasn’t playing out as well as she had hoped. But photography, she says, naturally became a way for her to express “the same energy” she felt and used while working in theater.
“For me, I am very interested in physicality, and I think (photography) sort of extends that interest,” Esther says. “And it partially comes from the traditions I was raised with, because physicality and sexuality were not a natural thing to speak about.
“But I basically discovered that (sexuality) is a natural thing, and I started to make work connected to that and that would express this. I feel like many people are repressed in a way, so I’m drawn to exploring that,” Esther says.
Those themes do play through in “Eggs to Apples,” but only delicately.
“You have to be very careful with that, especially working with younger and older women. But I don’t think my work is explicit, and I’m trying to explore this in a very subtle way,” she says.
“I think (the show and the work) naturally reflects me. A lot of my work reflects me,” she says.
In 2010-2012, Esther was a resident artist at Hygienic Art Galleries. But her eye for profound imagery quickly landed her shows around the world — prominently in Berlin, garnering the attention of art magazines throughout Europe.
Her exhibition “Eye Eat You,” held in a Berlin’s Eisenacher Strasse U-Bahn Station, was one of Esther’s first experimentations with inanimate objects in eye-catching and provocative situations — a diversion from her earlier photography style that more heavily explored facets of sexuality or eroticism.
Now, however, at her home in Old Lyme, Esther says she is largely influenced by her garden and the fruits and vegetables that grow there. Her chickens and their eggs have also played a part, inspiring one of the driving themes to her current show and its title.
“Eggs are so present in my life, and I’ve always been fascinated by them,” Esther says, explaining that she lets her mind freely associate what she finds in her garden with larger themes of feminine life cycles.
“(My photographs) always have a fantasy element with other objects, ones that randomly meet on the counter. And I have this emotional reaction to all those many energies,” she says.
“There was a time in my life when I was trying to control those things, how things were placed together in a photograph. But then I just decided that this is my imagination, I’m not going to block it. This is what I want to speak to, this is what I want to say by combining these elements.
“At the beginning, I was worried people wouldn’t know what’s going on. But then I was like, what can I do?
“Because this is my mind, and that’s all I can do. I can speak my mind. And that is freeing.”