ANNE ARDEN Mc DONALD
„I daytream to escape the everyday world of details and paperwork -or I go complete crazy. I have many fantasies that I can not achieve in life as I have known it -including being able to breathe under water and to fly- and am frustrated by the limitations of an earthbound body. In some of my photographs, I have watched myself achieving these goals. More recently, my work has centered around struggles we face every day: tensions and balances, keeping hope alive against the obstacles, and living in a vulnerable way without being crushed.“
Anne Arden McDonald
„…she creates an alternate reality. we, the spectators, cast aside our doubts and fears of the unknown and believe in the images because the innate realism of phtography perserves through even the most bewilderling and surreal flights of fancy. We are the weavers of legends, investigating the image and reconstructing the process, searching for the evidence that will tell us how the figure arrived in this location and what will happen next. Her precision and purity of technique captures the intangible qualities of abandon, excess and uncontrolled emotion and documents with clarity something subtle and shifting as mood and atmosphere. Anne Arden McDonald’s exploration of the unknown allows her images to be classified in many ways: as surreal, as fantasy, as self portraiture; but her work is perhaps closest in spirit to that of the Victorian travel photographers who tagged along on geological survey expeditions, and at the risk of their lives and their equipment, photographed the world out there, bringing home to the eyes of a stationary and less adventursome population images of beauty and grandeur, of the bizarre, the unbelievable, and the magnificent.“
by Wanda Strukus, European Photography
PAVEL PECHA
“I live in two worlds. One is real and the other imaginary – created out of the negation of reality’s bad qualities. The imaginary world is of greater value to me. It is my mirror, it is my picture. It is ever-changing, developing with an incessant self-control. I enclose myself into the imaginary little by little – perhaps voluntarily, perhaps as a necessity – for it is a far better and more perfect world than reality. It is neither pragmatic, nor logical, neither intolerant nor superficial. Explanations are not necessary; it is filled with fantasies, absurd situations and play. Sometimes, influenced by reality, violence and evil appear in my imaginary world. I use it as a mirror of reality.
I discover my world slowly; it is impossible to discover it all at once. And when I come across something new, it instantly changes. It is an exciting adventure, a touch of transcendence. I discover strange situations, surreal pictures, unexpected relationships. Sometimes it is just an idea, a sudden gleam, other times just a feeling. Sometimes the imaginary is built up as a mosaic into an inexplicable picture that can only be perceived by the subconscious. Sometimes I meditate in it, but the most beautiful pictures are in my mind. My imaginary world has been developing continuously, and while some things will remain until eternity, other things will always change. It shows me the way. My existence becomes a passage between my world and the real world. It is the passage between Sky and Earth. More and more often I find myself back in my own world, feeling intuitively that I do not belong in reality anymore. I do not know whether I shall ever return …”
Pavel Pecha