Everything depends on light, that great magician who, in a second, can transform the trivial into the extraordinary. Boris Savelev

PHotoESPAÑA presents its 2024 Award to the Ukrainian photographer Boris Savelev (Chernivtsi, Ukraine, 1947). An artist whose vision was forged in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, as part of a group of photographers working independently, outside the official photographers’ union. The exhibition Viewfinder – A Way of Looking, presented at this year’s festival at the Belgian Sawmill Cultural Space, is Savelev’s most comprehensive retrospective to date. Curated by Adam Lowe, the exhibition traces six decades of work: from his beginnings in black and white, through the colour of the 1980s, to the incorporation of digital, which he handles with the same mastery as analogue photography.

Text: PHotoESPAÑA