Voitek Pendrak

We have fallen into the trap that digital media offers. For many photographic artists, the software is the manipulator - it becomes the dominant tool - not for Voitek Pendrak. His inspiration comes from the subject medium and his exploration of that medium. 

The virtuality of software manipulation is replaced by his exploration of reality in his subjects and objects. He explores through physical manipulation what others explore through their keyboard. It is the constraints and challenges of the physical reality that causes him to investigate and create.

 From movie lights, candles, rope, material, chairs, bodies, fabric, frames and material fragments – all have their qualities, their rigidities and their flexibility. It is the manual set-up, the testing of the possible and impossible that drives his creativity.

 As was the gift of lighting in black and white movies, he plays with forms of light – what will absorb the light, reflect it, disperse it …. It is about his and his object’s broad spectrum. It is all about the effects – emotionally and scientifically.

 Combined with those effects is what he is actually trying to achieve. In a flash, we see the fleeting image of a human body, the emotion of the setting, the memories the iconic image elicits. He allows us to travel through his work, through his distractions, through bits and pieces of memory. It is a journey by medium and subject. Ultimately, it is emotion, realistically depicted and fully explored through the medium of light and photography.