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lundi 28 juillet 2025
Azov HorizonsLa mer d’Azov m’est apparue dans un éclat de lumière. Dans mes souvenirs de ce premier été russe, des reflets mauves miroitent sur une eau turquoise, les derniers baigneurs, portés par les hauts-fonds, conversent debout à une encablure de la plage, les grillades diffusent déjà des panaches de fumée odorante et les verres de vodka sonnent le glas d’une après-midi ensoleillée. par Patrick Wack |
Patrick Wack
French photographer Patrick Wack (b. 1979) grew up in the suburbs of Paris. After a career in sports and studies in economics and foreign languages in France, the US and Sweden, he left a job in Berlin to start again as a photographer in China. Fully self-taught, he was based in Shanghai from 2006 to 2017, Berlin from 2017 to 2021 and Moscow from 2021 to 2023 as one of the very few Western journalists remaining in a Russia at war. Wack works freelance for international publications and commercial clients, but he’s most passionately dedicated to long-term documentary projects that he feels are important to the understanding of our time. Mixing geopolitical and social topics with a subjective and contemplative storytelling, his work has addressed topics such as urban mutations in China, post-conflict reconstruction in Bosnia, the Uyghur nation, the frontier of the new Silkroad as well as war-time Russia and Ukraine. His work has been featured in publications such as TIME, The New York Times, National Geographic, The Sunday Times, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, der Spiegel, Stern among many others. His monograph « Dust » about the forced Sinicization of the Uyghur region was released in 2021 with French publisher André Frère Editions and was shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture award 2022. He’s also the cofounder of the Inland photo cooperative gathering 14 international documentary photographers. Wack was a National Geographic explorer in 2022 and a grantee of the French National Commission to photojournalists the same year. He is now again based in Paris. His new monograph “Azov Horizons” was released during the Rencontres d’Arles 2025.
He is fluent in French, English, German and speaks basic Mandarin Chinese and Russian.