Ivan Pastoukhov was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1951. Coming from a family of intellectuals and scientists, he graduated in medical engineering and worked for ten years at the Sofia Medical Academy.
A freethinker, with an independent mind and a passion for discovery, Ivan Pastoukhov found his way to the other side of the iron curtain. In 1984 he settled in Paris.
Art, philosophy, psychology, different sports all close to nature, 20 years of wine business, Ivan travels, meets people and develops a broad and manifold vision of the world.
Nature and human souls are travelling in his heart. Life will take him from New York to Yemen and from New Zealand to Peru before he returns to his ancestral near East: this time with a free eye and creative mind to shoot freely and with “Vinexcellence” in Sofia to introduce the culture and the best French wines can give…
Ivan keeps his free nomad’s mind in our world of perpetual mutation. Living is to be born at every moment, what real travelling is meant to provoke, what photography is trying to grasp.
ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHY:
I look for the instant when the image of everyday life disintegrates into its separate pieces and we find ourselves in a tangible harmony with it. Scientists believe that chaos is harmony of a higher order but in photography the magic of the apparent is without algorithm, without requirements. No additions, no extractions, no comparison. Only joy and the play of light – creative and live.
The photographer paints with light, he sees the world with his interior eye, for an instant he looses his breath, shoots. Then he inhales again deeply, says “thanks”.
At happy moments, when free of desire and possessed by the inner striving for perfection, something opens up, something is given to us and we are filled to the utmost. Joy remains, fears disappear – we are aware of the moment.
The painter lays hues and shades upon the canvas, the photographer uses the light and the shadows of the instant. No matter how we turn the image, the equilibrum is achieved. The possessed observer continues on his way changed. Art has accomplished its purpose.
To get to know something means to alter it. However, what remains on the film is the instant, the halted, unrepeatable moment. Though seen from our point of view, but let us “seek and capture life at any time, there where it exists”, as says Albert Kahn. In this world of ours, as good or as bad as we make it, life is everywhere.
After the magical appearance of the picture, after the first astonishment, there is a story, always unfinished, that never leaves us. And what is more, it is ever changing, It is then that photography becomes art – it breaks up our own limits, resurrects, opens new vistas…
Photography is itself a limit, by capturing the moment it freezes it and whatever the richness of that instant it is for ever severed from what was before and will be after, from reality in movement, ever recreating. However, it has another power, the power to stimulate one’s imagination and turn a passive observer into a creator.
It has been said that the hundred twenty fifth of a second, repeated a hundred times – represents more or less the hundred true moments in a photographer’s life. But how many are the great poems in a poet’s life, how many the unique shades on the palette of a painter, how many the true notes of a composer – all these are just moments of time which is nothing else but “eternity in movement” (Plato).
To get away from fragments, to make rules less harsh, to clear a way for the human in me, to search for a life without restrictions and conformity. To discover silence between the notes of the music, the white of the page between the words, to give a voice to the invisible in the picture.
The real challenge lies in the difficulty to become invisible in order to take better shots, to share joy without losing it, to preserve the happy instant. To love, unconditionally – there is no more to be asked.
We rely on the light which plays the game of perfection. Things vanish almost before we see them. We try to retain them, to catch them and to deliver ourselves from them. It is what I deeply feel that takes shape in the picture – for what else is reality but our inner feeling of the world, the way it recreates and expands…
I dig into my own hopes and disappointments. I try to find out what is the game of light and shadow. Is light seeking in its own shadow for perfect expression, full of meaning? Could it be that shadow “feels nostalgic” of its primary source ?
I try with each shot to reach the moment when the camera will melt in my hands as another useless proof of an unattainable aspiration.
What I seek is Beauty, the world’s real garment, for ever elusive and so desperately sought for.
My photographs are self-portraits.
