Tribute to the photographer who captured the EPFL buildings

The photographer who immortalized the EPFL buildings for the book ‘Perspectives on EPFL’ and the exhibition Infinity Room I, died suddenly on May 19, 2019. Bogdan Konopka was born in Wroclaw, Poland, in 1953. After training as a photochemist, he worked in applied photography at the Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, from which he resigned under pressure from the country’s political regime. He then joined the Fotografia Elementaria movement, but subsequently left in order to set up his own gallery, Post Scriptum. He became part of the underground artists movement and photographed his hometown with apocalyptic atmosphere. Bogdan moved to France in 1989 and continued to capture other cities in Europe and then China, seeking to show the universal nature of the ever-changing façade of urban environments. He has been commissioned by numerous institutions to portray contemporary buildings and architecture. To ensure complete command of each step of the creative process, he uses a large-format view camera and produces contact prints. He was particularly pleased to get back to a university for the work he did for EPFL. Throughout the year of his work, he captured the architecture of the School’s campuses, roaming the different sites to deliver images stripped of human presence but giving life to the buildings. His magnificent original prints are to be discovered until the end of July at ArtLab. He had also just released ‘Conte polonais’ (Polish Tale) by Delpire Publishing, a book full of poetry about his native Poland. He is represented in Europe by the Françoise Paviot Gallery, Paris, and in Asia by the OFOTO Gallery, Shanghai. His work is featured in a number of large public collections, including those of the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, the Centre Pompidou, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Frac Ile-de-France and the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne.