Ela Polkowska’s Splinter is built from a year inside a single house in a Polish village. Within it a family had assembled a world resembling a warehouse: rooms packed with things, broken and working alike, objects continually shifting position. Polkowska photographed that environment and its inhabitants over the course of a year, and the book registers how her own feelings moved as she worked, from the conviction that anyone may live however they choose, however disordered, toward the anxiety that such accumulation must end badly.

That tension between tolerance and foreboding is the subject, not merely the backdrop. Splinter treats disorder as both a literal condition of the household and a metaphor for lives lived outside the arrangements most societies treat as legitimate. The photographs hold tenderness and unease at once, and they resist resolving the household into either victimhood or eccentricity.

Polkowska works between documentary and art photography. She studied at HDK-Valand in Gothenburg and the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava, and has described an interest in places and people at the margins of everyday awareness. Her stated wish is that the book function as an intimate room, and that a reader can sense the material abundance of the house: the cloth, the wood, the surfaces of things. The design is by Ania Nalecka-Milach.

Splinter received the Svenska Fotobokspriset, the Swedish photobook prize, in 2025. The jury framed the work in terms of the force of individual images, of beauty found where it was not expected, and of a photographer willing to question both her own assumptions and the viewer’s. For collectors, the case rests there: a compact, considered first book by a photographer working attentively at the meeting of documentary and art, with a jury-recognized coherence and a tactile ambition that the hardcover presentation is meant to serve.