#28 cultura / natura
We shall attempt to define the theme of the upcoming Fotograf Festival from its middle point, at the borderline between culture and nature, and in relation to how that borderline is rewritten, to the points of overlap sought between them, and to the strange constellations in which artificial things become natural and natural artificial. It is no accident that it is these constellations, these ‘blue flowers’ (the image Walter Benjamin uses in reference to the presence of immediate reality in the world of film), that become such rewarding photographic objects. The camera brings us closer to nature but at the same time distances us from it. The attempt to capture nature in the lens of the camera can then be likened to the desire to understand a wild animal by placing it in a zoo or to learn about rare trees by planting them in a park or an exotic flower by visiting a greenhouse in a botanical garden. The naturalness of nature only comes to the forefront once we have experience its opposite; as Derrida points out, the awareness of nakedness is essentially human – animals are naked without knowing it.
The urge to return to nature is indelibly linked to the pervasiveness of technology in our lives. All around us irreversible processes are going on that are driven by momentary needs instead of long-term considerations. What do contemporary art and photography have to say about this and how do they say it?
#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…
Read moreContent
- ––– Project
- Disruptors of Social Stomach
- ––– Profiles
- Barbora Fastrová
- Ferdinand Bučina
- Josef Václav Staněk
- Peter Bartoš
- Asunción Molinos Gordo
- Michal Kern
- Bill McDowell
- Martin and Osa Johnson
- Petr Košárek
- Lukáš Kubec
- Adam Vačkář
- Pavel Sterec
- Simone Nieweg
- Jakub Skokan & Martin Tůma
- Claudiu Cobilanschi
- From the Ralsko Project
- ––– Interview
- Philippe Descola interviewed by Mariana Serranová
- ––– Discoveries
- Tricia Gahagan
- Jason Larkin
- Beatrix Reinhardt
- ––– Theory
- Modes of Seeing, Modes of Figuration
- Epilogue: The Spectrum of Possibilities
- ––– Events
- Obituary: Adam Holý
- 47the Edition of Arles Photography Festival
- Fotofestival Zingst
- ––– Fotograf Gallery
- Jan Nálevka
- Tereza Kabůrková
- ––– Reviews
- Miloš Spurný: The Czech-Moravian Highlands
- And the mysterious magic of the photographer's work does not consist in the red glow of the darkroom,
- Documentary in the Expanded Field
- Geoffrey Batchen: Emanations/ The Art of the Cameraless Photograph
- Josef Sudek as a Mannerist
- Elemental - Folk Art, Folk Politics
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