For as long as I remember, I always felt fascinated by photography.
In 1974 I began studying photographic techniques at the Fine Arts Section of the École des Arts et Métiers in Luxembourg.
During a year and a half I got familiar with the field of photography at a photographic studio, before resuming my studies at the Fine Arts Section of the École des
Arts et Métiers, which I graduated in 1977. Thus, in 2014, I became an independent photographer and a freelance graphic designer.
For more than three decades I had a successful career as a graphic designer and art director, as a freelance and at various communication agencies, yet I never
abandoned my early passion.
Since 2015, I am exhibiting my impressions from Belgium, Bulgaria, Crete, Croatia, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands, North
Macedonia, Portugal, Scotland, Serbia, Spain, Turkey and Wales.
Pepe Pax
April 2024
The Photographer with an empathetic eye
By Maurice Sherif; December 2020
What better way to improve your own work than to be inspired by Pepe photographs? I am absolutely convinced that discovering his portfolios helped me educate my eye and developed a better understanding of the possibilities that photography offers.
Contemplating his amazing photographs, in addition to being a pleasure, is an incredibly good way to develop anyone "photographic eye". He knows how to read and write visually; his new vision of contemporary photographic culture reveals the stunning intricacies and complex beauty of his works. He can see the potential for a strong photograph and then organize the graphic elements into an effective, compelling composition has always been one of his key skills in making photographs.
Pepe is a keen social documentarian of life as he discovered it around him, and with the benefit of hindsight, his archive now serves as an invaluable historical resource. He has documented a lot of places that no longer exists. I think there is also this sense that he has captured, and sort of plotted for us in time, these moments and these ways of life that no longer exist.
Pepe's technical skill is to be admired – his crisp, clear shots are well constructed compositions that give a transparency to all manner of difficult subjects – but it is the warmth and rapport with which Pepe approaches his subjects which most resonates throughout his oeuvre. He has a non-judgemental eye, and I think that is relatively rare within social documentary photography.
Pepe is prolific photographer, and there is an incredibly large body of work, so what I have tried to do is show all the different areas of his work within the context of the MFA program at the University of Colorado – and a lot of the slightly lesser-known works as well. What is more, the time lapsed a new emphasis on the timelessness of his work, while the change in context shifts its meaning. What should "art photography" look like? These same questions continue to provoke discussion and argument even today. Photography is still defining itself.
Pepe uses his creative thinking for better photographs. His work is reductive, stripped to essentials more objective than subjective anti-pictorial geometric abstraction. He has the potential for very graphic, even abstract imagery. He continues taking photographs that express an area's people, cultures, customs, landscape, and history.
Awards, Honorable Mentions & Exhibitions