This plantable photobook was designed to grow out of the ground

Ewelina Bialonszewska first discovered photography when her family left her Polish hometown of Lubań to move to Munich, Germany at the age of twelve. In these early years, “it was hard for me to make new friends, go to school, and create a place where I felt safe without knowing the language”, the photographer says, “but this was the moment I discovered photography. I realised that a camera and taking pictures could be a way to integrate myself in this new country.” Even in the artist’s formative childhood years, her image making was centered around documenting people, something that would later evolve into a practice focused on portraiture and place, honed during her time studying photography at university in Munich.

Following themes and threads of identity, memories, roots and belonging through all of her work since its early beginnings, the photographer has been working on freelance commissions and personal projects that look to transform intangible memories into something tangible ever since she graduated. “Photography is not only an artistic medium for me but also a tool to explore, question, and visualise belonging”, Ewelina shares, “I try to balance documentation and personal reflection in this work.”

Over the years this has led the artist to travel back to her hometown to capture the feeling of home in an ongoing documentary series Motherland, which asks questions: “How can a home be defined through images? How can I make projects that deal with home, migration or memory?” Upon each return to Poland the photographer set out to capture her family and friends who still live there, alongside a range of quiet impressions of the landscapes that she grew up in — “the rhubarb, the tomatoes, all the things that are quiet echoes of memory” she says. “Through these images, I tried to capture not only memories, but also the emotions, atmospheres, and fragments of everyday life that continue to connect me to my roots.”

In a recent self-initiated project titled Growing Album, Ewelina brought these images together to create a reimagining of the traditional family album by designing a publication that quite literally allows her to plant her Polish roots on whatever soil she finds herself on. Whilst selecting images of people, places and plants that hold deep personal meaning to translate into a photo book, Ewelina sourced something else to go alongside them: seeds that resonated with each memory.

In order to make the paper for the publications seed-sewn pages by hand, the artist used “old maps of my hometown, Lubań, and carefully archived newspaper clippings collected by my grandmother”, to form new sheets. Ewelina then embedded these regional seeds into the paper’s grain whilst it was still damp, and once half-dry, began the photo transfer process: “I chose this technique intentionally: it securely locks the seeds between the paper and the transfer layer, allowing them to remain intact, while still offering the possibility for the seeds to germinate from the back,” she tells us.

The resulting images are printed with a soft textured and painterly appearance — almost as ephemeral as memories themselves, stitched together with garden cord from her grandmother. A photographic vessel that looks alive and tender, the book will grow differently depending on what foreign ground it greets – a quiet reminder, in physical form, that “home doesn’t always have to be a fixed place but rather a space that we continuously recreate, depending on where we are at any given moment”, Ewelina ends.