Waiting Room

Waiting Room is a body of work that has evolved over a series of staged encounters across Poland. These “still lifes” of young models are carefully staged within the intimate space of their bedrooms, surrounded by sentimental objects reflecting their teenage reality. The artist purposely styles her subjects in the latest collections of Poland’s best designers so they resemble models thrown into the limelight of fashion.

Within this project, the visual commentary shows that the perceptions created through fashion, an undeniably narcissistic industry defining aspirations for consumers through its choice of aesthetics and constructed in the form of pre-adolescent models, is socially flawed. As an outsider looking to critique this deliberate shallow reality, viewers too find themselves seduced by the innocence, purity, and youth seen in Promińska’s work. This constructed reality is by no means new.

Is it not the case that since the beginning of time art has displayed youth as the definition of beauty?

These works add an additional layer of interest with the private spaces in which these subjects sit. Their own waiting rooms. It is in the small details that the clues stare back at us—teddy bears, dolls, fashion posters. The juxtaposition highlights their potential imminent reality. A dream that may or may not exist. One can only be drawn into their hope that they will one day be a poster on another teenage room wall. Promińska continues to shoot and question this dreamscape. This waiting room.

Zosia Promińska is a Polish photographer who has studied ethnolinguistics at Adam Mickiewicz University and photography at the Academy of Photography in Warsaw. Her work has been published in a number of magazines, including Vogue, i-D, Harper’s Bazaar, and L’Officiel.