It is only the shade that describes the light
 
This is a truly phenomenal, extremely unusual collection of novel picture themes that have barely anything to do with the uncountable daily offerings of photographed pictures in the media, taken in public places or at art museums. So Pavel Odvody‘s picture world may appear strange to us at first sight... we are unable to associate a visual experience with it, with only a few capable of sharing his perspective. But of one thing we can be certain: this isn’t today’s way of taking pictures – either as an applied photographer or a so-called free photographer.
 
But at second glance, it gradually crystallizes what he is driven by. He is not concerned with exterior reality, i.e. the subjective presentation of an objective physical world. Rather, his passion lines in the visualization of an inner reality. He doesn’t focus on the expression of a concrete human face, for example, but the expressive power of the face in itself; nor the beauty of a certain body, but the manner in which bodies converge into something like ‘beauty‘, fully elementarily in changing light and moving phases; not the form or material of an object, but the conditions and stipulations needed to make the ‘essence‘ – that which prevails over an object’s transience – visually graspable.
 
Only the anxious look at the exterior, at the pictures’ superimposed, interlocked, divided and recombined segments, focuses our eyes to the interior, to acquired and approved arrangements which – precisely because they are familiar and expected – no longer have to be perceived exactly. Only the disproportion sharpens the eye for proportions. Only the blurring contours allow an object, a figure or grouping of bodies to become clear. Only the concentration of movements sensitizes us to the question of how and when movement transforms a body into a figure and how it even leaves traces in things at rest. Finally: only an irreverent relationship for the theme teaches us to respect and become passionate for the theme. Only the shade describes the light.
 
Prof. Peter von Kornatzki
(excerpt from text written in 2005).