Bogdan Konopka
in Carleton-sur-Mer

Following pressure brought by the regime, Bogdan Konopka resigned from the University of Technology lab. He co-founded the Fotografia Elementaria movement, broke off from it, then founded his own gallery, Post Scriptum, and took part in underground artistic activities while photographing his town and its apocalyptic atmosphere.

He arrived in France in late 1988, where he continued his work on the evolution of cities. Bogdan Konopka photographs their hidden, fragile faces, taking as his own the reflection of Georges Pérec, “not as the one pretext for a despairing acquisitiveness, nor as the illusion of a conquest, but as the rediscovery of a meaning, the perceiving that the earth is a form of writing, a geography of which we had forgotten that we ourselves are the authors.” Presented during the 2000 Mois de la Photo in Paris, his work on the capital focused on unclassified heritage. Grand Prix européen de la photographie in 1998, he spent two years traveling in Central Europe, his itinerary based on the names of acquaintances in his address book. The work from that period, entitled Reconnaissances, would take the form of an exhibit and a published portfolio. Then he turned his gaze to Chinese cities and their seriously threatened vernacular architecture. Stripped of all human figures, these photographic miniatures give off an ineffable breath of life.

Represented by Galerie Françoise Paviot in Paris and Glaz Gallery in Moscow, Bogdan Konopka’s work can be found in important French public collections: the Musée national d’art moderne (Centre Georges-Pompidou), the Maison européenne de la Photographie and the Fonds régional d’art contemporain de la région Île-de-France (all Paris-based), as well as the Fonds national d’art contemporain.