Polish photographer Pola Esther is no wallflower. To stand next to her at an art opening, in one’s drab New York uniform of sophisticated neutrals, is to feel rather lacklustre.
You’ll need a moment to take her in: Neons, pastels, plaids, florals all jockey for attention. She’s invariably accompanied (and accessorised) by her artist and collaborator husband Brian, who wears his own dandy version of the day’s palette. ‘We are groupies for ourselves’ she says. And somehow she has managed to find make-up in the same Crayola shades as her clothes- the brightest blue eyeliner, sugar almond pink lips, a slash of mint green or tangerine for her lids.
On any day of the week she could give Carrie Bradshaw a run for her money.
Growing up in ‘ Łódź’ , Poland Pola forged an identity based in glorious technicolor, a bird of paradise in a grey concrete jungle. ‘Driven to ‘dress up’, she borrowed clothes from her mother and maternal and paternal grandmothers and made them part of her own wardrobe. Clothing shortages made this a pragmatic way to build her teenage identity. ‘Embracing color’ as a contrast to the desaturation of the landscape and the grey skies was ‘meaningful’ to her. Color represented an ‘exotic life’; ‘Everything seemed so far. Color was a journey. You couldn’t travel but you could add color’, explains Pola.
Before Instagram, she was using Polaroid to capture her looks. Loving a pun almost as much as a vivid outfit, she would hold herself on a leash and called the project ‘Style-Leash’.
Pola Pol-Ska, is her chosen identity for her most recent series of pictures, reinforcing her connection to her homeland. Taken on her childhood housing estate these portraits explore themes of femininity passed from mother to daughter and also refer to the industrial textile heritage of her city. When Pola wears a towel on her head she’s remembering how her mother would hoard them in case of a shortage. (The same towels appear in the city’s textile museum). In others, she poses suspended from the parallel iron bars used not for exercise or play but for beating carpets, camouflaged in a lilac bush and reclining in a ‘rewilded’ lawn (formerly a construction site between the tower blocks) in her communion veil. Pola Pol-Ska is a force of nature reconsidering the context she grew from, weaving her past into her present.
