Patrick Wack is a self-taught photographer based in Shanghai. Born in 1979 in Cannes, France, Wack’s studied economics and linguistics, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in Foreign Languages (English/German) and a Master of Arts in Business Administration from the Paris Business School (ESCP-EAP) in 2005. After spending several years in the United States, Sweden and Berlin, Germany, he left his marketing position in the software industry to pursue an interest in photography. Fully self-taught, he first started shooting in Berlin for fashion and portrait clients before resettling to Shanghai in 2006, where he has since been working as a freelance photographer in the fields of portraiture, reportage, corporate and advertising photography.

Wack focuses on human portraits and reportages, enabling him to build a narrative in his work. In his series Kingdoms, Wack montages images to visually communicate a story, recounting the livelihood and daily happenings of his subjects. Considering himself a photographer, not an artist or creative photographer, Wack develops work anchored in reality and displaying an unabashed optimism. “Even if I photograph a worn-out peasant, I’ll try and make him into a glorious figure of some kind,” using reality to develop his own aesthetics. “After five years of being a photographer, I am still very much in the process of defining what is my style and what I should focus on. China is a great playground for that.” – Patrick Wack

Wack works with a number of commercial clients around Asia and is also active in the field of photojournalism as a member of the renowned German agency LAIF. He has shot features for The Sunday Times in Fukushima and in the DPRK for The Sunday Telegraph. He has also been published in well-known magazines such as Monocle, Tatler, Courrier International, Elle, Vogue and Travel & Leisure.