Featured in this third collection of Milan's images are 99 striking examples of his intuitive and distinguished portrait photography, taken between 2010 and 2020. Milan commenced work in 2010 on what was to evolve into his vast London Trilogy: 100 Faces of London, Outsiders in London, Are You One Too? and Londoners at Home: The Way We Live Now. Though these projects alone offered Milan over 200 opportunities to capture the human face, his portrait work has also encompassed a variety of individual sitters, family groups, as well as a number of remarkable portraits taken for the sadly abandoned project, Artists in London.
For many of these portraits, Milan chose what is arguably old-fashioned, studio portraiture. This is an art form rarely practised nowadays, but Milan believes it creates portraits that are as much the creation of the sitter as they are of the photographer. His leisurely, studio-based technique engendered a closeness between sitter and photographer that seems almost tangible in many of the portraits. Echoing a remark of the great Irving Penn, Milan observed that a photographer working in this way cannot but help 'fall in love a little' with each of the sitters he observes through the lens. Often, in Milan's characteristic portraiture, the focus of the image is the sitter's eyes — it may be trite to observe that 'the eyes are the windows of the soul' but there can be little doubt that it is mostly through the eyes that we humans connect.
The Photographer, Milan Svanderlik, is a veteran observer of the extraordinary diversity and beauty of nature, people and life in general. Milan Svanderlik Photography: Portraits comprising photographs taken from 2010 to 2020, is the third of three volumes illustrating his work. Over the years, Milan's highly original and well-regarded photographs have been exhibited in a number of art galleries, both here in London and 'over the pond, in New York.
