Multidisciplinary artist born in France in 1972.
Photography is his main medium, to which he also associates video and storytelling.
Organised in series or episodes, Richard Pak's work is constructed empirically, without dogma or programme and without systematicity. However, as with any artist, the body of his work is structured around important concepts and appropriate formal research. Whether the approach is experimental and plastic, classical and documentary, sociological and realistic, Richard Pak asserts his freedom of narrative.
Since his earliest series he has been interested in representing intimacy in the private and public sphere.
From 2003 to 2009 he spent long periods in the United States where he shared the daily life of those he photographed, breaking free from the boundary between the viewer and the observed, from the inside and the outside.
With Je ne croirai qu’en un Dieu qui danse he chooses emotion as the theme of his works to question the dynamics between the crowd and the individual through a process of accumulation and seriality. For two years he attended concerts and festivals with his back to the stage, interested only in portraying on people's faces the strength and variety of emotions aroused by music.
The Les Fiancés series also questions the intimacy experienced in public space.
In 2014, during an artistic residency, he spends a year meddling in the daily lives of ‘not exactly alike’ twin brothers. The series Les Frères-pareils (photography, video and narration) addresses the theme of normality and society’s gaze on those on the margins.
Although the common thread of his artistic research is to observe how his contemporaries live and represent their ‘struggle for life’, he is also interested in the issue of the photographic landscape.
Curious about the complexity of the world and in love with distant places, since 2016 he has started an anthology on island space. The first chapter of this cycle (Les îles du désir) takes us to Tristan da Cunha, in the middle of the South Atlantic (series The Firm), the most isolated inhabited territory in the world, an attempt of ‘eutopia’ dating back two centuries. The second chapter (series L'Archipel du Troisième sexe), produced as part of the 'Grande Commande Photographique' of the Ministry of Culture, led by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, leads us to Tahiti, Polynesia where he realizes portraits of Raeraes, figures who transgress biological gender boundaries since long time, inspired by the photographs of the first western explorers who discovered the islands. The third chapter takes us to the island of Nauru (Oceania) where the exploitation of a phosphate deposit, discovered at the beginning of the last century, turned the island from the richest country on the planet in the 1970s to one of the poorest today; in this series the artist decides to experiment the use of a phosphate derivative to "sacrifice" his negatives as they sacrificed their island (which has now become an infertile desert).
His photographs are part of public and private collections, including the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Neuflize OBC Collection, Le Château d’Eau Collection, Toulouse.
He regularly exhibits in France and abroad.

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