Andrej Perko - Magical darkness

“… Browsing through old, years and years of untouched footage, not so long ago, Andrej found an old footage from way back in 1972, when he took a lot of photos while visiting Mount Everest, but they were unusable due to overexposure and some flaws. They remained intact, but not discarded. The new era brought the possibility of digitizing the film, and thus those “defective” recordings became useful and, due to the distance in time, revealed even to the author himself the continuous red thread of his decades-long creation. Loyalty to fragmentation, extracting from a vague whole, the moment of black-and-white photography, framing methods, the desire to approximate the texture and the inherent aesthetics of the whole are the characteristics of the author’s photography, which appear as unchanging, eternal companions in almost every shot. The author’s photographs are actually true pictorialism, where the approach to the individual subject is in the direction of discovering and emphasizing beauty, tonality and composition, and nothing at all in revealing or documenting reality.” Curator Saša Bučan.

Andrej Perko was born in 1946, graduated from the grammar school in Novo Mesto, graduated from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the University of Ljubljana, later studied at the Ljubljana Pedagogical Academy. In the years 1968-71, he was a member of Fotogrupa ŠOLT, and later he also received art education at numerous workshops under the mentorship of Duba Sambolec, Dušan Fišer, Andrej Trobentar and others. He deals mainly (but not exclusively) with analogue, black and white photography and old photo-graphic techniques. He is a member of DLUSP (Society of Fine Artists of Northern Primorska) and ZDSLU (Union of Slovene Fine Artists’ Societies). His photographs were exhibited in solo or group exhibitions both at home and abroad, and quite a few are also kept by some gallery collections, including the Cabinet of Slovenian Photography (Gorenjski muzej Kranj) and C.R.A.F., Centro Ricerca e Archiviazione della Fotografia in Lestans (Italy). In addition to photography and related exhibitions, he is also the author of five photography books.