Pep Ventosa’s lifelong passion for photography began with his first camera at the age of 10. He learned the mechanics of the darkroom at Escola d’Arts i Oficis Artístics de l’Alt Penedès in Vilafranca, Spain, and later taught himself the possibilities of the new digital darkroom.
His work is focused on an exploration of the medium itself - deconstructing and reconstructing photographic images to create new visual experiences.
Ventosa received top honors in 2009, including both a People's Choice Award and a winning Juror Selection from among thousands of entries from more than 85 countries in the prestigious Prix de la Photographie Paris competition, as well as an Honorable Mention in the London International Creative Competition. His photographs have exhibited in the U.S., Spain, Germany, France, and Switzerland, and have been jury selected for special exhibitions by the late Robert Rosenblum, curator of 20th Century Art at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Pritzker Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Royal Photographic Society of Madrid among others. His work is in the permanent collection of the Crocker Art Museum and his creative work processes are used as a teaching guide for photography students.
Born in 1957 in Vilafranca del Penedès (Barcelona), Spain, Ventosa currently lives near San Francisco, California.
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Esquire Magazine “…he adopts the creed of the photographer Hockney and his Picassian commitment to demonstrating that representational pictures (whether paintings or photographs) are as unrealistic and abstract as Guernica. Picasso, Hockney, and Ventosa show their cards while performing their magic tricks. They reveal in their own works the mechanisms of perspective and representation, corral the concept of the meta-narrative, of truth that gives a global meaning to the world, of a one-to-one panorama of what is real.”
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AZART Photo Magazine “He is particularly an expert in the art of fragmented photography: he takes dozens of photographs of all the details of a place. Then he reworks each photograph one by one, modifying for instance the colors. After, he recomposes one image of the place, like a mosaic. Every detail is narcotic. ... In his series of "Carousels", he photographs merry-go-rounds in motion, while walking around them. Then he superimposes all the photographs. The final image represents the merry-go-round, and its environment, at 360 degrees.”
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Collecting Fine Art Photography “In the project The Collective Snapshot, Spanish photographer Pep Ventosa has compressed hundreds of pictures, postcards, and his own shots of world-famous metropolitan landmarks into unique compositions. These architectural icons, transformed here through sandwich projection and negative collage, recall futurist art and the related technique of photodynamism. They are a unique attestation to our collective memory.”
Digital Collage and Painting
“The master of this technique [fractured panoramic] is Pep Ventosa."
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