About

Sven Marquardt's analogue black-and-white photographs often seem inspired by paintings of early
Italian Baroque painters like Caravaggio or Ribera, or by Spanish siglo de oro painters such as
Velázquez, Murillo, and Zurbarán. Again and again the figures in the portraits seem to emerge from
fields of deep black. The pronounced light-dark effects are not the result of the medium of
photography, but a very conscious and skillful stylistic choice, though one to which the medium
lends itself very well. With his clear outlines and hard shadows Marquardt creates very plastic effects,
rendering the …