Karolina Karlic is a Minneapolis-based photographer. Born in Wroclaw, Poland, her family immigrated to Detroit in search of the American dream in 1986. Karlic’s work explores American culture from the complicated perspective of an immigrant and a “white” girl growing up in urban Detroit. Growing up the daughter of highly educated parents who fled communist Poland to find work in the American auto industry, Karlic watched as her father’s hopes for his family crumbled alongside the stocks of Ford, General Motors and DaimlerChrysler’s North American operations.
Her series The Dee (slang for Detroit) explores themes of desire and regret. Vacant automobile factories and single-family homes stalled in construction stand silently in Karlic’s photographs, metaphors for economic crisis and its effect on a community. Also included in the series are portraits of people the artist has met on the streets and images of young families gathered on the porches of rental properties, which speak of beauty, creativity and the desire to succeed.
Karlic’s current work continues to examine the theme of desire and, its flip side, despair. Through photography and video, she is exploring ways in which the Internet is used as an anonymous space to romantically connect, as well as to reveal one’s deepest desire or shame.
