PATRICK WACK
Patrick Wack is a self-taught photographer based in Shanghai. Born in 1979 in Cannes, France, Wack studied economics and linguistics, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in Foreign Languages (English/German) and a Master of Arts in Business Administration from the Paris Business School (ESCP-EAP) in 2005. After spending several years in the United States, Sweden and Berlin, Germany, he left his marketing position in the software industry to pursue an interest in photography. Fully self-taught, he first started shooting in Berlin for fashion and portrait clients before resettling to Shanghai in 2006, where he has since been working as a freelance photographer in the fields of portraiture, reportage, corporate and advertising photography.
Wack focuses on human portraits and reportages, enabling him to build a narrative in his work. In his series Kingdoms, Wack montages images to visually communicate a story, recounting the livelihood and daily happenings of his subjects. Considering himself a photographer, not an artist or creative photographer, Wack develops work anchored in reality and displaying an unabashed optimism. ‘Even if I photograph a worn-out peasant, I’ll try and make him into a glorious figure of some kind,’ using reality to develop his own aesthetics. ‘After five years of being a photographer, I am still very much in the process of defining what is my style and what I should focus on. China is a great playground for that.’ – Patrick Wack
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