Adolescence is a twilight zone where existence hangs in suspension, stitched together from fragments of horror, drama, and the surreal. This landscape is a shadowed one, where every moment teeters on revelation. Magdalena Wywrot’s Pestka, out now via publisher Deadbeat Club, exists in this universe of the in-between.

The book is a visual examination of Wyrot’s relationship with her teenaged daughter Barbara and the city in which she raised her: Kraków, Poland. In it, shadows stretch across each frame, forming corridors that echo solitude and the tensions of adolescence—a black-and-white psychodrama steeped in abstraction, expressionism, and surrealism. Through Wywrot’s lens, a mother’s quiet vigilance becomes a subtle form of surveillance, her unspoken watchfulness unfolding in hushed spaces.

Wywrot’s shift from professional clarinetist to photographer began with a simple, familiar urge—that impulse to capture her daughter’s fleeting moments. Her images, steeped in film noir intrigue, invite viewers into a world—her world; their world—where mother and daughter play roles both intimate and mysterious, their bond suspended in an eerie light.

Wywrot's Pestka (meaning “seed” in Polish, an affectionate name for her daughter) spans nearly two decades, offering glimpses into motherhood that are as haunting as they are tender. This world, a strange mix between Kraków and rooms within Wywrot’s house, feels hermetically sealed: a mother and daughter captured in a dreamlike liminal space, where memory, perception, and moments of change blur together.

Across Pestka’s 146 pages, essays by David Campany and Barbara Rosemary accompany Wywrot’s work, inviting us to observe (but not to partake in) the charged silences and shadowed transformations in each frame.As her daughter moves forward, Wywrot remains a shadowed observer, documenting Barbara’s metamorphosis from behind a gauzy veil that softens reality. Pestka meditates on the invisible bonds that tether us.