Minimalist Still Lifes I In the Studio with the Polish Photographer Pawel Żak

Artistics Online Art Gallery

21/12/2023

“For me it’s more important to show inner picture that I got in my mind than to describe reality.”

✴ Pawel Żak — contemporary photographer — opens the doors of his studio in Warsaw, Poland. Watch to discover his timeless still lifes featuring ordinary objects in minimalist, sophisticated and mysterious compositions...

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Art et design

Transcription

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00:00 I'm Paweł Żak, based in Warsaw, Poland. I'm a photographer, or to be more precise,

00:14 maybe I should say I'm a visual artist working with photography, and I'm also a

00:20 teacher of photography. I started to use photography more than 30 years ago when

00:26 I was a student, and at the beginning it was like usual, taking pictures of friends,

00:34 taking pictures of beautiful landscape and so on, but after some time I saw

00:39 that for me it's more important to show inner picture that I've got in my mind

00:45 than to describe reality, and that's how it started. It was still in this time

00:50 when we all used analog materials, negatives, slides and so on, and I

00:57 started with negatives, with black and white, and soon I saw that taking

01:05 picture is just the beginning, and the negative is like a score maybe, and the

01:11 final result is the print. So I was working quite a lot in my darkroom,

01:17 trying to find a way to make this what I wanted to be visible in a picture, not

01:26 only the things, but the mood.

01:31 The first important series of my work was Tales, that I started in 90s, and I

01:43 received a very important prize, important for me, a pre-blanc color de la

01:49 lumière in Switzerland, and from this I should say this my career started.

01:57 There was a lot of exhibition of this series, and soon I published my first

02:03 book called Tales. For me this series Tales is like a diary of these years

02:10 when I was working on it, because it was time when my first child was

02:16 born, and it was also time when I had an opportunity to remind how it was when I

02:21 was a kid. So that's why I use these toys, these little things, describing my inner

02:29 world and my inner child.

02:36 So the other series that I want to tell you about is Still Lives, which was

02:41 published in a book, and other still lives, and it's based on one set table,

02:47 white cloth, and a space that could be anywhere, and there are things that are

02:53 showing on a table, and they are not intended to show what's going on a table,

03:00 but rather what's going on around the table among people that are gathering there.

03:07 [Music]

03:34 Now I'm working on a new series of work, it's connected with sky and its

03:40 photographical representation. It also has like intended as a more like

03:48 symbolic meaning of the sky, and I work digitally, but I work hard in my studio

04:00 to receive result I need without digital manipulation.

04:07 [Music]

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