Originally from Poland, her family migrated to France before WWI and WWII, but Dorothée Nowak also lived in Italy, Spain, Australia, Japan and now Canada, in Montreal where she graduated with a BFA in Photography. Dorothée works as a freelance photographer, and is developing several personals projects. Her series Tell Me Her Story Because War Is Only the Half of It is an attempt to find out more about her roots within her family history.
The photography has come to Dorothée gradually since her dad was an avid amateur, developing black & white, colors as well as photomontage in the darkroom. She spent hours looking at his images, until she bought her first camera in an old Russian market in Poland when she was a teenager. While she was traveling, she eventually decided to go back to school to learn more about the medium.
Her documentary project Tell Me Her Story Because War Is Only the Half of It explores the subject of displacement and the concept of migration, based on her father’s family immigration history from Poland to France in 1938. Mixing past, present and future, the series overlaps archives from her father’s collection, places she visited and documentation from the Museum of Ostrow Wielkopolski. This city is where her grandmother Teresa lived under Germany occupation, before her family left on the eve of the Second World War. “No one in my family talked about the past. Teresa’s story is not as obvious as it seems and I believe there is more. Yet, the research done in Poland has not been successful and the story of Teresa still remain hidden”.
More to see on her website.
