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The Girls from Szymanow - Life in a Catholic Boarding School by Jan Brykczynski
The high wall at the far end of the park – it might have been erected by Franz Kafka. A boundary that is more perceptible than visible and hidden in the soft fog: intangible and hyperreal at the same time. Like the severity that seems to surround the girls’ smiles like a hard case. The girls, the boarding-school and the wall against the temptation of the world. Brykczy?ski did not exactly make it easy on himself. That is revealed at every glance. The distance between the viewer and the motif is difficult to comprehend. And the place is as alien and rigid as an insect preserved in amber. These pictures have something unapproachable about them, even in those moments when an effort is made to wring a tiny bit of exuberance from the rigorous life of a boarding-school. The sleigh ride across the virgin snow; the dancers in uniform: these small freedoms are frozen here into minor escape attempts that are doomed from the beginning to fail. Education lasts four years at this Catholic girls’ boarding-school in Szymanow, an island to the south of Warsaw and really located somewhere between anachronism and timelessness. Education here used to be restricted to daughters from “better families”, but now the school is open to all strata of society. The rules, however, have remained the same. Clothing, schedule, etiquette: a long list of regulations leaves little space for individuality. That can be seen in the details, among them the wrinkles on bed sheets that seem to be resisting attempts to smooth them. And certainly the flowing white robes of the nuns with their charges kneeling beside them.
