Borrowed Familiarity
Borrowed Familiarity was photographed during a trip to Poland in the summer of 2024 while traveling with my friend Adam. We moved through Warsaw and Gdańsk before visiting the small village where his grandmother lives. As the trip progressed, the photographs shifted from public spaces and brief encounters toward the quieter intimacy of his family home.
I spoke no Polish, and much of the family spoke little English, so Adam often translated between us. Yet familiarity developed through things that required little translation: being offered food, sharing a table, sleeping on his grandmother’s couch, watching relatives move through familiar rooms, and witnessing small gestures of affection and routine.
The photographs do not attempt to describe Poland as a country or claim an intimacy I had not earned. Instead, they consider what it means to briefly enter a world that belongs to someone else—to move from observation toward participation, and to experience a place through friendship and hospitality rather than as a collection of destinations.
The closeness in these photographs was real, but temporary. Borrowed Familiarity is about that unstable position between stranger and guest, distance and recognition: the brief moment when someone else’s ordinary life begins to feel familiar before you have to leave, yet stays with you long after.