Exhibition opening: “Sofia, Winter Light”

Free registration for the event HERE

You are invited to the Private View of ‘Sofia-Winter Light’, an exhibition of fine-art photography by Dominic Pote; a series of winter cityscapes made in Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital city.
Come along from 7pm on the 2nd of November to the Sofia Gallery at the Bulgarian Cultural Institute in Kensington, London. The private view will be accompanied by some fine Bulgarian wine provided by The Old Cellar and some beautiful music by the Bulgarian cellist Magdalena Petrovich as well as the accordionist Giancarlo Palena….

This exhibition is kindly supported by the British-Bulgarian Society.

The exhibition will be on until the 11th of November.

Dominic Pote was born in 1977 in East Anglia, and inspired by art and photography from a young age. He graduated with a degree in photography at Nottingham Trent University in 2000, which included a year of study at FAMU in Prague and the Hochschule für Grafik Buchkunst in Leipzig.
“Photography freezes the moment.”

American Indians distrusted photographs, as they believed that the pictures ‘steal the soul’. French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson talked of the photograph’s ‘decisive moment’, that potent instant frozen forever within a single frame.

When Dominic decided to dedicate himself to photography, he wanted his pictures to be more like the work of the Impressionists and Expressionists. Usually the camera captures what is seen. Dominic strives to find a way to capture on film not what lies on the surface, but rather what is concealed within the image, or what often remains concealed from the physical lens of the camera – the feeling, or the soul of a place. His photography is an attempt to express and reveal the experience of the time and space.

In order to achieve this, Dominic created his own hand-made camera which enabled him to capture on film the notion of time and movement in the landscape, or rather the marriage between movement and stillness, between the visible and invisible, between time and eternity. The photographs portray not merely a moment in time, but the passing of time.

The Sofia series was made in the winter of 2017. It is one of Dominic’s first attempts to experiment with a digital camera in order to develop his concept, having previously worked only with film. However, it remains central to his concept to create the image within the camera, without further alteration after the shot is taken.

Sofia is Dominic’s wife’s home city. It is the city where his family often returns, charming, warm and majestic at the same time. In this series Dominic wants to tell us about the silence and the soul which Sofia possesses, the quiet conversations and the slow footsteps under the street-lights of snow-covered pavements and wintery parks.

On his blog Dominic writes:
“The silent wonder of the city in mid-Winter… The beauty of this city with its thick muffling blanket of snow, its shining golden domes, its people who traverse the white tree-laced-parks like timeless figures in a Dutch renaissance painting…Here I saw real Winter, the one which comes and stays, one which the city and its people embrace and allow to become a part of their lives, its majestic white dominion transforming the life of the city, changing its rhythm and even, paradoxically, bringing warmth and light…”

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“As with the great German Romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich… Pote suggests the underlining spiritual significance of the landscape and the redemptive possibilities of the sublime.” – Review, Sue Hubbard, London 2007