Inspired by her own ‘crazy’ youth and literary heroes such as Kafka, the impressionistic images that the Polish photographer made of her daughter growing up are intimate and bleakly beautiful

I first became aware of Magdalena Wywrot in 2016 when I happened upon the mysterious images on her Instagram feed. In grainy, high-contrast black and white, they were glimpses of a darkly imaginative universe that she had created within the confines of her small flat high above the streets of Kraków. In it, her daughter, Pestka, danced, laughed, daydreamed or stared moodily out at the world below, a nocturnal cityscape of twisting highways and tram tracks that, bathed in the harsh glow of tall street lights, appeared luminous and unsettling, almost dystopian in its eerie emptiness.

Their intimate mother-daughter dynamic was such that Pestka, even as a young child, seemed utterly at ease in – and acutely aware of – the transformative eye of the camera, whether returning its gaze with a look of fierce intensity or caught in a blur of almost demonic movement as she jumped with abandon on her bed.