Photographer and filmmaker Joanna Piotrowska explores issues such as the female condition, family dynamics, and post-Soviet Poland, through black and white images that depict the quotidian. Her work investigates the symbolic and invisible power structures that constrain personal behaviors, singling out how culture, politics, and history impact each person’s intimate and emotional life. Documenting gestures of care, self protection, or control, Piotrowska’s images render these daily scenes uncanny through attentive composition. Piotrowska does not consider her photographs to be documentary but rather sees them as performances, where the characters’ poses, facial expressions and movements are carefully directed.