#5 Borders of Documentary
In the third year of the existence of Fotograf Magazine we decided to tackle the delicate subject of the “documentary” as our contribution to the as yet non-existent debate regarding the “direction of contemporary documentary photography”. However, while the classical figures of documentary photography mainly focused on traditional humanist themes, documenting unguarded moments in street scenes, moving or funny, or imaginatively photographed human relations, it seems as though today this area has suddenly become empty, or rather, it seems that all has already been done and further repetitions merely trivialize the genre.
For more than a decade there have been efforts in contemporary photography to use the documentary method to express a personal concept, to play with it within the framework of staged documentary, or on the other hand, to renounce the elements of compositional or situational aesthetics, renouncing what is now almost pejoratively called artistic photography, instead to pursue personal record, a sort of visual diary, featuring photographs which deliberately depart from aesthetic criteria. It seems that in the last decade, much has changed also in the understanding of the medium of photography as such.
#41 postdigital photography — Profiles
Filip Láb

Filip Láb, who died unexpectedly and prematurely in May 2021, was not only a prominent theorist and teacher of photography, but was also one of a generation of artists that dealt with the shift in political polarities and radical changes in the photographic paradigm…
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Eva and Franco Mattes

Two recent works by Eva and Franco Mattes – Personal Photographs (2019) and Nostalgia May 3, 2021 (2021) – invite us to see photographs, and their authors, as online platforms see them…
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Agnieszka Sejud

Apart from studying law in Wroclaw, the Polish author Agnieszka Sejud also studied at the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava. Her training, therefore, is in photography, even though she presents herself more as a visual artist and activist in her work, often as a member of the art duo KWAS, which she forms with her ICP classmate Karolina Wojtas…
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#41 postdigital photography — Profiles
Bára Mrázková

We see something, we don’t exactly know what. We want to find out; we enter the image into the search engine. It finds something, we don’t know exactly how, usually more or less the right thing…
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Sanaz Sohrabi

Although it might sometimes seem that way, photographs never exist in themselves. And this is doubly true of those made by machines or for archival or documentary purposes. As the art of Sanaz Sohrabi demonstrates, images (and particularly reproduced images) are part of often unwanted testimony embedded into dense nets of relationship…
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- ––– Profiles
- Zbigniew Libera
- Beth Block
- Paula Miklosevic
- ––– Theory
- Casablanca
- Narration in the age of databases: between fiction and documentary
- Mannequins in a favorable light
- ––– Events
- Paris photo 2004 & Mois de la photo v Paříži
- The fourteenth annual month of photography in bratislava
- ––– Reviews
- Vicious Circles
- Toman's Panoramas
- Sudek's most region, according to Antonín Dufek
- Galerie Vu´ in Prague
- Henryk Ross: Lódź ghetto album
- Village- a catalogue by Lukáš Jasanský and Martin Polák
- Double Skála
- ––– History
- Déja vu
- ––– Portfolios
- Andreas Weinand
- Josef Moucha
- Susan Lipper
- John Trotter
- Martin Parr
- Graciela Iturbide
- Jiří Hanke
- ––– Tendencies
- Filip Láb & Bára Mrázková
- Alastair Levy
- Lucia Nimcová
- Tomáš Ludvík
- Ivars Gravlejs
- Ondřej Přibyl
- Tomáš Souček
Archive
- #35 living with humans
- #34 archaeology of euphoria
- #33 investigation
- #32 Non-work
- #31 Body
- #30 Eye In The Sky
- #29 Contemplation
- #28 Cultura / Natura
- #27 Cars
- #26 Documentary Strategies
- #25 Popular Music
- #24 Seeing Is Believing
- #23 Artificial Worlds
- #22 Image and Text
- #21 On Photography
- #20 Public Art
- #19 Film
- #18 80'
- #17 Amateur Photography
- #16 Photography and Painting
- #15 Prague
- #14 Commerce
- #13 Family
- #12 Reconstruction
- #11 Performance
- #10 Eroticon
- #9 Architecture
- #8 Landscape
- #7 New Staged Photography
- #6 The Recycle Image
- #5 Borders Of Documentary
- #4 Intimacy
- #3 Transforming Of Symbol
- #2 Collective Authorship
- #1 Face