#29 contemplation
For a topic of “contemplation” there is an essential moment in the history of photography that brought the search for it through photographs into the spotlight. It was after the publication of Stieglitz’s famous cycle Equivalents: records of a visual game, perhaps of symbolic messages, unknown to us and communicated through the clouds in the sky above and their situational compositions. In this spiritual space, the artist seeks a deeper connection to our ephemeral lives and suggests that these insights into the nearby celestial space may bring a sense of harmony with the depth of the heavens and the universe, and perhaps even provide relief from the pettiness that life constantly forces on us.
In Central and Eastern Europe, the tradition of contemplative photography is particularly strong. There are conceptual and performance artists – those who seek a distinctive form of harmony between themselves and their chosen space through meditative activities connected with natural rhythms, using nature as a studio for their actions. In all of these approaches, time plays a central role. Quite often it is in the form of the ritual repetition of similar approaches, when time and never-ending shifts in the protagonist’s life rhythm constantly change the default situation, while, at the same time, there remains a noticeable common order, which dominates the resulting feeling one has from individual photos and entire series.
#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…
Read moreTaste Fotograf #40
#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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- ––– Project
- Matej Chrenka
- Matěj Skalický
- ––– Profiles
- Viktoria Binschtok
- Jáchym Myslivec
- Polina Karpova
- Ján Kekeli
- Tereza Kabůrková
- Martin Vongrej
- Clare Strand
- Mary Ellen Bartley
- Zbigniew Dłubak
- James Welling
- Petr Faster
- Jan Hudeček
- Miloš Šejn
- Jan Svoboda
- ––– Discoveries
- Schinster
- Rudolf Skopec
- Hilla Kurki
- ––– Theory
- Stieglitz/Equivalents
- ––– Events
- Paris Photo 2016
- The History of European Photography 1900-2000
- ––– Fotograf Gallery
- Daniel Steegmann Mangrané
- Jiří Poláček
- Rafani
- Václav Stratil
- ––– Reviews
- Libuše Jarcovjáková - Book of Life
- Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia: On the Needles of Days
- Artpress - The Great Interviews series: Photography
- Havel the Human Being
- Baňka's Reflections (and the need for a conflict of interests)
- The Photograph in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility and Its Outreaches
- Július Koller - One Man Anti Show
- ––– Portfolios
- "The Other Night Sky": Seeing and Counterseeing
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