Polastories is a 20-part series that investigates the subjective charge of images and the fragile construction of visual truth. By pairing photographs—detached from their original contexts—with random comments, I deliberately disrupt their neutrality. 

The images are displaced from whatever factual origin they once had and reinserted into newly fabricated narrative frameworks.

Through this intervention, meaning is no longer anchored in documentation but becomes fluid, unstable, and speculative. 

The added comments function as narrative triggers: they suggest explanations, emotions, or events that may never have occurred, yet they immediately reshape the viewer’s perception. What appears documentary becomes fictional; what seems authentic reveals itself as constructed.

The deliberate use of a (faked) Polaroid format reinforces this tension. Polaroids traditionally carry the promise of immediacy—an unfiltered glimpse of a fleeting present, a supposedly truthful fragment of reality. By simulating this aesthetic, the work references the belief in the instant photograph as evidence, while simultaneously undermining that belief. The format evokes authenticity, even as the narrative beneath it is fabricated.

In Polastories, fact and fiction collapse into one another. The series openly operates as a constructed illusion, yet it exposes how easily images generate new references, associations, and personal narratives. The viewer becomes complicit in completing the story by filling gaps.

Ultimately, the work questions not only the reliability of images but also our desire to believe them. It reflects on how meaning is continuously rewritten through context, framing, and language—and how every image, regardless of its origin, remains open to reinterpretation.

Brigitte Konyen 2023