For a year and a half, Johanna-Maria Fritz photographed Mihaela Minca and her family, and the resulting book, Daughters of Magic, is not a report on the occult but a patient portrait of a working matriarchy. Minca is described as Romania’s most powerful witch, a trade passed down from her mother and grandmother and now run with her daughters and daughter-in-law. Clients from around the world seek love spells and curses; the internet has made the business international, yet the pictures treat magic as ordinary, folded into daily life in a tight Roma community in Southeastern Europe. Fritz’s images are described as sensitive and powerful, which is to say they do not sensationalize what they find.
The book’s attention falls on how women hold authority in a culture otherwise shaped by men. Witchcraft here is both profession and expression of female strength, and the photographs refuse the distinction between performance and belief. The publisher credits Delaine Le Bas with the accompanying text, an authorial voice that frames the work without competing with the images.
A modest sixty pages, thirty-one illustrations, and a square 28 x 28 cm format keep the sequence tight. The velvet hardcover with gold foil stamping is an object that asks to be handled, and its materiality suits a subject in which touch and ritual matter. Published by Hartmann Books, the edition is in English; the publisher’s front matter does not state a publication year, while an independent catalog dates it to 2025.
Fritz studied at the Ostkreuzschule, became a junior member of the OSTKREUZ agency in 2019, and has received the Inge Morath Award and the German Peace Prize for Photography; the work was also included in the agency’s exhibition CONTINENT – In Search of Europe at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Daughters of Magic stands as a considered early book by a photographer whose practice is defined by long stays and close company.
