Le Ciel au-dessus du Sertão, Composition, 2006
Patrick Bogner lives and works in Strasbourg. He has been a freelance photographer since 1985 and divides his activity between professional photography and his own artistic expression.
His favourite themes revolve around Elsewhere, that elsewhere which is not a faraway place but the reverse side of a place, its invisible side; an elsewhere which, present in a place, would need photography to embody itself, to make itself visible.
Since 2000, he has focused on the notion of Vanity and has been building a body of images on this theme using a wooden camera with its black veil, following the example of 19th century photographers, with the aim of ritualising his work and imposing slowness on himself.
He is now travelling throughout the northern lands after having walked for twenty years in the Brazilian Sertão and other remote Latin American lands.
From 2014 he will explore the theme of the Sublime, the silence and the “tragedy of the landscape” dear to the first German romantics, those of the circle of Jena.