“You know that feeling when you are gathered around a fire?” asks Samson Contompasis a celebrated multi-disciplinary artist. “That feeling of essential unity, of being around a fire? Sarah Pezdek is that fire. She has that fire. She has the ability to bridge gaps, to get people together who normally wouldn’t be able to come together.”
Pezdek uses to her photography to play with light and form with an elegance and supernatural confidence that defies her age. Her presence is ephemeral and yet deadly focused. Her gaze caring but deeply penetrating. She has photographed for Tom Ford, Michael Kors, La Perla, Estee Lauder, Kohl’s, Beekman 1802, Lands End, Joseph Carr Wines, and CS Global.
Her work has been published with Cosmopolitan, OUT magazine, Country Living, Chronogram magazine, Vogue Japan, Vogue Italia, and Martha Stewart.
Still, she remains accessible, hosting get-togethers of local creatives at her home in Round Lake, a home Richard Lovrich described in our pages as “not a container for her family and work but a piece in a series of her work, let’s call the piece, ‘home.’” Her portraits include a who’s-who list of local influentials from David Girard of Foundry Theatre, Mistress Couple of La Domaine Esemar and Michael Eck. Those portraits convey a heavy depth—and function as windows into her subject’s souls.
Contompasis has worked with Pezdek on a number of projects he says would have been impossible without her keen sense of form. “These are things that would have been impossible in retrospect had I not had her to collaborate with. They wouldn’t have been nearly as vivid and thoughtful as they were without her. She has an innate gift that someone or something gave her that she uses to help people out like me.” A common refrain amongst Pezdek’s friends and admirers is that she has an eye for photography they can’t even hope to aspire to. “I turn to her when I need someone to use photos to illustrate emotion, to illustrate power, to illustrate form,” says Contompasis.
