Maria Gawryluk was born in 1993 in Kraków, Poland. She studied at the Faculty of Painting at Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts. Following this, she continued her studies at the Faculty of Graphic Arts, where she received a master’s degree in photography. In 2014, she had her own exhibition entitled Otoczenie, or Environment, as a part of Photomonth Festival in Kraków. In 2017, she was one of the winners of the 4th edition of DEBUTS, a project which presents the most talented emerging Polish photographers. As part of the DEBUTS project, she participated in many exhibition groups in Poland. In 2017, her works were shown during a group exhibition at the Maison de la Photographie in Lille in France. She debuted with her photo series entitled City.

While looking at the architecture of a city, I bring out facades of “cultural institutions” from dark streets, as well as other intriguing, more or less anonymous buildings, which in the day light are often unnoticeable, invisible, pushed between concrete buildings often coming from different times, now – thanks to photographs – they take on a new look. They look like film sets where the play of lights and shadows intensifies the tension and we gaze at, waiting for any event to come.”

She has also always had a keen interest in fashion photography. For several years, she focused on female photography. She took a different direction, paying attention to the shots that appear between the ‘right’, expected frames, in which the models took a schematic pose, performed learned gestures and repeated the same facial expression. She noticed the moments that would’ve been unwanted during a regular photo shoot. The path she followed could be described as ‘shooting between,’ with the aim of the technique attempting to capture ‘awkwardness.’ She decided to create her own story about women, using photographs that do not fit in with what we know from the main circulation of fashion photography or made available to us by the media. Photos rejected by models after the session became the matter of her work.