Janusz Fogler: Powrót do ogrodu

The exhibition _Powrót do ogrodu_ (_Return to the Garden_) was prepared to celebrate the 50th anniversary of my creative work – says Janusz Fogler. – This anniversary coincided with my 70th birthday. It was created for several months. There is no picture taken earlier than a year ago. The artistic adventure of photography intrigued me almost all my life. I managed to take it seriously only after I stopped travelling with the camera around the world and decided to return to the family garden. I have been looking into it for many years, but there was never enough time for these earlier returns to allow me to penetrate into the world around me. There is no denying that I have been interested in the relationship between photography and painting for a long time.

According to Janusz Fogler – comments Zofia Jabłonowska-Ratajska – the photographer sees more in the surrounding world than others - and this perception of something "more" may mean discovering places, people, meanings, as well as unknown or unrecognized, which lasts just next door, in his own garden. Armed with a camera, the artist walks and looks, taking pictures of a flower, on which the light is arranged in a way that brings out surprising, unexpected colors. These colors, captured in the lens, create an image even different from the one noticed by the naked eye.

The resulting photographs – photographic images – resemble a study of color, as if entering into an overexposed color. And they are not any experiments, colors subjected to laboratory processing. Photographs of flowers seen at different times of the day, in different light, at different angles, out of focus - they lead to colourful discoveries, over which the photographer, unlike the painter, does not have full control. He does not know what color he will get, he discovers it through careful observation recorded then by the camera.