Lying Still

Birthe Piontek’s practice encompasses an extensive investigation of the self through photography. While focusing primarily on portrait photography, she also creates still lifes and installations and uses found photography as ways to further experiment with expressions of identity. Piontek’s Lying Still series began as a visual diary that would accompany the artist through her daily life, capturing peripheral subjects of the ephemeral and abject. The artist’s compositions—that may at first appear as delicate disruptions of the everyday—address themes of intimacy and mortality through her photographic language of rich symbolic iconography, evoking the desires, urges, and fears that exist latently in our subconscious.