Izabela Marczak (born in Poland, 1983) is a photographer, ethnologist and cultural anthropologist, and an alumna of the Sputnik Photos Mentoring Programme. Her photographic practice focuses on people and their relationship with space, through portraits as well as photography of architecture and everyday life. She is interested in the relationship between the one who looks and the person or object that reveals itself. For ten years, she worked in documentary wedding filmmaking, winning awards in international competitions and serving on their juries. She describes her observations of everyday spaces as „the anthropology of everyday life” – looking for traces of human presence, accidental arrangements, gestures and similarities that emerge regardless of place or culture.

Izabela says “My intervention in Râsu'-plânsu' was spontaneous and intuitive. As I looked through your book, my head filled with images that instinctively started talking to yours. I love photographing what I encounter in everyday space - it's my anthropology of the everyday. And since I'm a girl from the city center, that's my natural environment. Except that over time, my "city center" grew far beyond Wrocław (into the surrounding villages, Katowice, Berlin, Yerevan, Manila, New York, Łódź, Lwówek Śląski, and many other places).

In these spaces, distant from one another, I keep finding something familiar. Similar objects, traces, and ways of taming a place. We differ in languages, cultures, and landscapes, but we surprisingly do so many things alike, and everyone has their own râsu'-plânsu'.

It's a wonderful adventure to enter into this kind of interaction with you.”

instagram: @re.bellamarczak