Joanna Kustra

Joanna Kustra’s photographs look like paintings from the eighteenth century. There’s no visible seam between the photography and the painting—it just reads as period work, the kind that makes you stop because you’re not entirely sure what you’re looking at.

Everything pulls from Pride and Prejudice or The Duchess—that whole visual language of period cinema. The lighting, the posture, the surfaces. It’s like she understood that aesthetic completely and then made something genuinely her own inside it.

It made me think about the language from that era, too. How people actually wrote. All those subordinate clauses and digressions, the formality mixed with genuine observation. I’ve kind of seriously thought about trying something in that voice, which would be a complete disaster. Everyone would leave.

But there’s something genuinely compelling about existing in that sensibility, whether it’s visual or linguistic. The simple fact that it’s possible to make something that feels like it belongs to a completely different world altogether.