This project, initiated in 2018 during a residency in Łódź, Poland, took root in a chance encounter the photographer had with Cosmos, a Polish novel. This text acts as a revelation: it transforms Brod’s initial intention – to photograph in the spirit of Kieslowski’s moral cinema – into a more interior, less narrative quest, guided by the obsession with form, a central theme in Gombrowicz’s work. “I intuitively took to Gombrowicz’s novel Cosmos,” explains the photographer. “It was a true literary revelation, his writing literally grabbed me, fascinated me and troubled me, so much so that it ousted Kieslowski. I never would have believed that I would follow in his footsteps for seven years – even though the series has been interrupted many times – that I would share his passion for the drama of the human form: the plurality of ways of being according to culture, beliefs, convictions, human behavior, the way in which interiority manifests itself outwardly.”
“I felt close to his quest for signs, to his relationship with detail,” she confides in an interview with the writer and critic Fabien Ribery. This intellectual and emotional proximity permeates all of Brod’s work, which spans several years, between Poland, Argentina and France. In it, Brod explores the ways in which the individual is shaped and deformed through contact with others, between interiority and social mask.
A photograph of emotion
For Brod, photography doesn’t freeze; it captures the floating. “This novel confirmed a creative process I’d been developing for several years, broadening my perception of reality and interhuman relationships, the emotions they provoke, which I give form to through photography.” She captures suspended gestures, furtive glances, ambiguous postures, with a marked attention to fragments: a neck, a hand, a knee on the ground, a face – recurring, almost symbolic figures. It is in these details that a form of discreet awakening is hidden.
Far from a cold conceptual work, The Time of Immaturity is above all driven by emotion. Brod claims an intuitive approach, guided by what she calls the “stuttering of the moment.” There is in her a keen awareness of openness: photographing someone, she says, first involves listening to them, meeting them. The shot is only the third step in a process where the relationship takes precedence.
Gombrowicz in the background
Gombrowicz’s work is present throughout the book, but not in a direct or illustrative way. His influence is more subterranean, integrated in a personal way by Nolwenn Brod. We find in his photographs certain themes dear to the writer, such as kneeling, transformed faces, or the childlike appearance, but without insistence or obvious staging. “I am in a way looking for the fleetingness of a gesture, a look, the shape of a face, anything that would give me a strong impression, so that it would tip me even further into life, that it would continue in my imagination, and that an idea would emerge,” she says.
Brod also takes up two of Gombrowicz’s strong ideas: that of the “Gueule,” the mask that others stick on our faces, and that of the “Cuckoo,” which refers to the way society treats adults like children. These notions are echoed in his images, which often show characters caught between who they are deep down and what is expected of them. The series focuses on ambiguity. It reflects the contradictions of human identity, always in tension.
Between gravity and gentleness
The book is distinguished by a warm overall color scheme, with golden, almost twilight lights. This is a way of not accentuating the austerity of the subjects covered, but rather of offering them an emotional welcome. Despite sometimes dark themes—the Holocaust, exile, the deformation of the individual — Brod’s gaze is neither cold nor distant. It is attentive, modest, and tender. “I often take sides between the carnal and the spiritual in photography, and the modesty of the body or feelings, oscillating between dissimulation and discretion, is essential in my relationships with others.”
Some images border on the strange, others touch on grace. All are pervaded by a form of restraint: modesty, for Brod, is an essential posture, a mode of approach as much as an aesthetic choice. It highlights suggestion, slight disturbance, eloquent silence.
Titled as a nod to Gombrowicz’s Memoirs of the Time of Immaturity, published in 1933 (renamed Bakakaï), Nolwenn Brod’s book fundamentally questions what it means to grow up. Not in the sense of settling down, but rather of remaining alert, open to the world, receptive to change. For her, immaturity is neither a weakness nor a nostalgia: it is a way of resisting the rigidity of ready-made forms.
The Time of Immaturity, by Nolwenn Brod is published by lamaindonne edition and available for 42€.
