In what lies the power or even the world-building properties of photography? Joanna Zylinska, a media theorist, artist and curator from King’s College London, seeks to answer this question in her book Nonhuman Photography, freshly translated into Czech by Robert Silverio…
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As Manfred Heiting confirmed in the recent interview for British Journal of Photography, his collection of photographic books burnt down during the fires in California last year. In 2002, he donated his extensive collection of photographs to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and his collection of photo books, currently deposited in his house in Malibu, was supposed to be moved to the museum in 2023…
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In 2018, NAMU (the Publishing House of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague) published one of Nadar’s kaleidoscopic memoir publications – When I Was a Photographer – supplemented with an expert afterword written by Tomáš Dvořák…
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Looking at the impressive Czech-English publication of 512 pages, one cannot but wonder who the author dealt with on so much space is. Undoubtedly, Jiří Šigut (1960) is known only to well-informed people, which is a shame, having contributed to the contemporary art scene with a few small exhibitions and catalogues…
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Fw: Books, an Amsterdam independent publisher, has focused on photography and “related topics” for 15 years. Last year, they published a volume with a poetic name, The Photograph That Took the Place of a Mountain by Taco Hidde Bakker, a Dutch theorist of photography…
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Contemporary technologies have changed our perception of public and private space. The virtual environment and online platforms disrupted the principle, which until recently has been materialized by architecture, where the interior is perceived as a space for privacy and the exterior for relations with the surrounding world…
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The last book by Michel Poivert, Peintres photographes: De Degas à
Hockney, presents photographs by famous painters from the 19th and 20th
centuries. Poivert does not take an encyclopedic approach: the selection of
authors is not exhaustive (for example, Ellsworth Kelly, Ad Reinhardt, Sean
Scully and other artists are missing)…
The book Karel Otto Hrubý: Fotograf, pedagog, teoretik (Photographer,
Educator, Theorist), published to accompany the carefuly conceived
retrospective exhibition of the same name at the Brno House of Arts (5
December 2017 – 4 March 2018), presents a comprehensive profile of the
Brno photographer, educator, critic, promoter of photography, jazz man and
painter…
In 2009, the Fiducia gallery in Ostrava presented an extensive collection
of photographs by Josef Moucha. All of them were taken at the time of the
Czechoslovak normalization, during the then compulsory military service…
In the 1950s, André Malraux applauded the ability of photographic
reproduction to decontextualize artworks even more consistently than
classical museum of arts. Malraux’s idea of making artworks from
various cultures equal through photography (The Imaginary Museum
of World Sculpture) reminds us of another photographic project of
that time: Steichen’s exhibition Family of Man (1955), showing mostly
works by Western artists, yet trying to present photography as an
instrument of interpersonal understanding and a proof of equality of
people all over the world…
Ondřej Durczak’s Proof of Discoveries. Photographs in Science 1839-1939 is an
extraordinary publication in the Czech Republic, and there is no other such book
available in Czech. It is based on the content of the author’s bachelor thesis, which
he defended at the Institute of Physics of the Faculty of Philosophy and Science
of the Silesian University in Opava in 2014 and has now has been published by
the same school’s Institute of Creative Photography…
“Jesus, I have no idea what I am about to enter into. I’m still not sure it is for real. I still wonder if they are trying to entrap me” noted the director Laura Poitras in her journal on February 9, 2013 after being anonymously approached by Edward Snowden under his cover name Citizen Four…
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The genre of the new book by critic and art historian Douglas Crimp is not easy to classify. One of its layers has the character of a memoir. The author very briefly recounts the years in his home town in Idaho and his studies in New Orleans; other chapters deal with the period between 1967 and 1977 – from the year when Crimp settled in New York City to his second exhibition Pictures at the Artist Space gallery that he is mostly associated with even today…
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One of the basic premises of Beyond Objecthood is the author’s belief that art should have a critical impact on the viewer. Though never expressed explicitly in the book, this stance becomes evident in the choice of subject matter as well as the narrative approach and selection of artists…
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The publication The Black Years by Libuše Jarcovjáková (b: 1952) crosses boundaries – and not only in one direction. In this case, we are interested in those of a genre nature, or, more precisely, those to do with classification: Is The Black Years a photography book? Or is it more a work of visual text? We tend to believe it is more of the latter…
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In 2016 Ashgate Publishing released the second, paperback, edition of Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia: On the Needles of Days, in which authors Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Michael Richardson, and Ian Walker explore the phenomenon of Czechoslovak photographic surrealism from their position as neutral outside observers…
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Over the course of its 40-year history, the French monthly Artpress has published numerous interviews with artists, curators, and theorists that have expanded our understanding of contemporary art…
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If a photograph truly has the magical power to bring into the present that which was, then both of the discussed books are an unusually powerful representation of the life of Václav Havel…
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At the start of this review of Pavel Baňka’s monograph, it is a good idea to avoid the suspicion of any conflict of interest ensuing from the photographer’s post as the editor-in-chief of this periodical…
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The book The “Public” Life Of Photographs is the first volume in a series based on the collaboration between MIT and the Ryerson Image Centre (RIC) in Toronto. Although it is not mentioned in the book, its contents are based on the eponymous conference, which took place in 2013, specifically at RIC…
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Should we want to show the shift in the interpretation of at Július Koller’s works that occurred at his retrospective exhibition at the mumok – museum of modern art – in Vienna this year, we would have to compare it with this Slovak artist’s breakthrough exhibition, which was held in 2003 in the gallery space of the Kölnischer Kunstverein…
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In the last decade, people interested in Czech photography had more occasion to be pleased than ever before. In addition to the growing number of exhibitions, a staggering number of books of differing quality were also published, sometimes at the author’s expense…
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The ambitious atlas Slovenská fotografia 1925-2000 (Slovak Photography 1925–2000) weighs almost three kilograms. It is subtitled: Modernism – Postmodernism – Postphotography. The Slovak National Gallery published a thousand copies of the Slovak-English book last year on the occasion of the Bratislava exhibition of the same name…
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Today it is generally accepted that the golden age of Czech photography
was the inter-war period when the ‘new medium’ was at the very centre
of contemporaneous artistic trends. But although people speak of Czech
avant-garde photography with respect, although it has recently even
received favourable attention in the rest of the world, it has not yet been analysed in as much detail as would seem…
The theme of the human face has played a crucial role in the history of photography. The first photographic portrait was made only three months after the medium was invented in August 1839. In a single year, a number of portrait studios sprang up all over Europe; these were able to provide, for considerably smaller sums, what previously only the rich had been able to afford…
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“Gaining access to computer code, understanding its ‘message’ and being able to use it for one’s own means are political, as well as social and economic issues. They are deeply intertwined with the dynamics of power and knowledge in contemporary society…
Read moreThe exhibition of the Swedish artist Annika Larsson (born 1972, lives and works in New York) at the Futurum Gallery in Prague, the artist’s first presentation in the Czech Republic, features two award-winning video works, which belong among her most impressive and compelling projects over the last four years (we should also mention at least her videoinstallations D…
Read moreWhat is important? is the question with which the three curators – Dorothee Bienert (Berlin), Lars Grambye (Copenhagen) and Lolita Jablonskiene (Vilnius) – set about their investigation of contemporary photography in the states bordering on the Baltic Sea…
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October 4th last year, a Saturday, saw the opening of the 5th Biennale
of photography, Funke’s Kolín, this time with the secondary title “100%
best quality now available for only 90 % of the price” – “A slogan
originally serving as an advertisement for some of last season’s goods
nevertheless manifests to us some topical phenomena of our society,”
writes the festival’s organizer, Veronika Fabiánová…
Galerie Rudolfinum prepared for Fall 2003 another theme-centered exhibition. Two previous areas of interest of director Petr Nedoma – the Far East and photography – resulted in cooperation with Taiwan curator Chang Tsong-zung, and in the extensive retrospective Strange Heaven – with the undertitle, Contemporary Chinese Photography…
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“What served in place of the photograph; before the camera’s invention?
The expected answer is the engraving, the drawing, the painting. The more
revealing answer might be: memory…
Klaus Honnef is the author of this rapturously acclaimed exhibition. The reviewer of MF Dnes (9th August 2003) lavished the highest praise on him: “It s a first-class exhibition, such as the Czech Republic has never seen before“ one read below the uncritical headline – An outstanding perspective on German photography…
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Henri Cartier-Bresson was born on August 22, 1908. Ninety-five years later a one-day conference was held to commemorate his work on May 14, 2003 with the participation of Peter Galassi, Anna Fárová, André Gunthert and Edgar Roskis…
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The artist‘s first monograph was published by TORST in 2001, entitled
simply Jaroslav Rössler, with an introduction by Vladimir Birgus,
featuring 95 photographs of his selection. The reviews back then
betrayed their total dependence for information on the book reviewed…
Following the unexpected death of Ivan Lutterer (Prague, April 27, 1954 – Rochester, November 11, 2001) the non-profit society Czech Photo (České foto) decided to preserve his studio in its entirety…
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As recently as fifteen years ago, the oeuvre of Jaroslav Rössler (1902–1990) was familiar only to a small circle of photography scholars. No monograph dedicated to Rössler existed, nor had there been a major retrospective in any museum of international importance…
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The essays which accompany the third and to date the most comprehensive monograph dedicated to Vladimír Birgus (b. 1954) are written by the art historian Štěpánka Bieleszová, curator at the Olomouc Museum of Art, where she presented a retrospective in honor of the photographer’s sixtieth birthday (15 May – 15 September, 2014)…
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On September 11, 2001, the entire world witnessed images in which at first their authenticity was hard to believe – and together with the passing of the 20th century, this heralded the end of the tenability of the notion of the documentary photographer as a person occupying a privileged position with the right to depict the misery of others, sending “objective” reportage out into the world; this notion had originally derived from the key role of photojournalists working for illustrated magazines, a role which had been questioned by artist-photographers already since the 1970s…
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Vilém Flusser’s notorious essay Towards a Philosophy of Photography, first published in German in 1983, here comes out already for the second time in Czech and the present edition thus represents, more than anything, an opportunity to rethink the contemporary context of Flusser’s ideas…
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Who today has even heard of names like Vojtěch Kramer, Josef Pírka, František Krátký, Rudolf Bruner-Dvořák, Jan F. Langhans, Ignác J. Schächtl, Josef Seidel, Jan Kříženecký, or Karel Dvořák? The raconteurs of history naturally reach for examples that are closer at hand…
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As both a trained art historian and a photographer, Tomáš Pospěch is one of those qualified to “think photography” from both perspectives, from the position of an artist as well as a theorist…
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Snapshots perform the role of witnesses. They exist as proof that the event which they record has indeed taken place, and are presented as such. Carefully assembled in a family album, they chart the life of an individual from their very first steps, through the loves and achievements of their life, to the serenity of old age…
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Ivan Pinkava has had a number of exhibitions both at home and abroad, but until the recent Rudolfinum Gallery venture, we did not have the opportunity to become acquainted with his entire and extensive oeuvre…
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The Langhans Gallery in Vodičkova street, Prague, held an exhibition of panoramic photographs by Ivan Lutterer (1954–2001), who had been connected to the Langhans Gallery through the tight bond of his restoration activities – he devoted several years to the maintenance of negatives and to creating new prints for the Langhans “Gallery of Celebrities”…
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It is to the great credit of art historian Jaroslav Anděl that he has rehabilitated the pre-war group Linie, active in České Budějovice in the 1930s, with a groundbreaking exhibition and book-length catalogue…
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When I interviewed Lukáš Jasanský and Martin Polák some years ago, among the themes we broached was the barrier between the adherents of of “pure” and “impure” photography, a barrier actively present on the Czech art scene for nearly a decade…
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The Egon Schiele Art Center in Český Krumlov celebrated the anniversary of Běla Kolářová’s birth (1923) by holding a retrospective exhibition, accompanied by the publication of a monograph. The publishers commissioned Josef Hlaváček to write an introduction (translated into English and German), and the concept and organization of the event was done by Hana Jirmusová on the institutional side and by Martin Souček of the Arbor vitae publishing house…
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“I sometimes miss the words to express my feelings, but they stay with my papers, with tiny records of wind, water flow, a fallen leaf… an imprint of the world,” we can read in the manifesto of Jiří Šigut in Cameracura, a new series of Czech and English catalogues from the Moravian Gallery in Brno, brought out by the same publishers through whose care the half-yearly Fotograf appears…
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The Czech literature on photography possesses a long shelf of missing books, particularly in terms of thorough art-historical monographs. Even legends, such as the internationally recognized figures Josef Sudek and František Drtikol, are represented only by isolated essays…
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A richly illustrated portfolio of the work of Jiří Toman (1924-1972) was presented in Fotograf No 3. An exhibition of 65 panoramic shots from the collection of the East Bohemian Gallery in Pardubice provides a good reason to return to this enigmatic artist…
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The second posthumous edition of Sad Landscape (Northwest Bohemia) 1957-1962 by Josef Sudek (1896-1976) is of uncommon significance. It consists of reproductions of 89 panoramic photographs from the collec- tion of the Moravian Gallery in Brno…
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One of the Czech Republic’s most prominent galleries recently hosted an exhibit from the largest private photography gallery in Paris, Galerie VU’. The exhibit at Prague’s Langhans Gallery was prepared by Galerie VU’ art director Christian Cajolle and its director Gilou Le Gruiec…
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A slightly controversial exhibit of photographs by Henryk Ross in Prague’s Langhans gallery presents works whose importance lies both in their visual impact and artistic quality but above all in their content, becoming an important historic testimony which brings new and often surprising images of the holocaust and life in the Nazi ghettoes during World War II…
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City, village and landscape… map
Already the fifth catalogue by Jasanský and Polák, Village/Vesnice (Makum a Divus, Galerie Švestka, 2004) came out to accompany with a six months’ delay an exhibition of the same title that took place in the summer of 2004 in the Švestka Gallery…
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Among the cultural events in Prague, František Skála’s solo exhibition in the Rudolfinum Gallery became the highlight of the year. Moreover, one of the undoubtedly individual artists of the Czech contemporary art scene did not leave unchallenged the historical and retrospective nature of the prestigious setting, and central to the exhibition were for the most part new sculptures and works created directly for installation in the given spaces…
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The Inaugural Meeting of the Photo Festival Union was held on September 29 and 30, 2005 in Lodz, Poland.
During the meeting, the directors and representatives of the member festivals signed a common declaration and made plans regarding the future of the PFU…
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/Langhans Gallery, 16 November 2005 – 19 February 2006/
The huge boom in Japanese photography that has been filling galleries all over the world since the 1980s has for the most part missed Prague…
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The 6th annual event Funke’s Kolín added to the phenomena that have become the festival’s central theme, such as Body, Landscape, or Advertisement, another major theme: the City. It may not be a strikingly original choice, but the very breadth of its definition gave the exhibiting artists as well as the curators a wide margin for maneuver, which is often more important than a narrowly outlined concept…
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/langhans galerie praha, 21. 9.–6. 11. 2005/
This was the first time that the Langhans Gallery in Prague held two exhibitions simultaneously in their premises: these were a retrospective of Manuel Álvarez Bravo and a more intimate collection of Gerald Slota entitled ”Found“ (Nalezeno), in the gallery’s basement…
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Since the 1960s, in Czech galleries and publishing there has gradually developed a body of research, analysis, and historiography on photography. There first emerged projects of monographs of major figures (Drtikol, Sudek), and in the 1970s and 1980s there followed an expansion into the bordering areas of experiments in visual art and photography, research into the work of various art groups, or later the analysis of decades of creative work…
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What is photography? This question can be answered very simply, as if it almost answered itself, or on the contrary only with difficulty, if we choose to take it as a challenge for serious thought. In the first case, all we need to know is how to use things – at a level so basic that we do not even have to think: photography is a means of making pictures…
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At the end of 2014 the DOX Center for Contemporary Arts in Prague was host to the opening ceremony for the traveling photo-exhibition This Place, accompanied by an eponymous book. Initiated by the French photographer Frédéric Brenner, the project represents the perspective of twelve photographers on Israel and the East Bank of the Jordan today…
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The scarce number of monographs on contemporary Czech art has received a recent addition in the form of Tomáš Pospiszyl’s volume with the promising title Asociativní dějepis umění (An Associative History of Art)…
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Brněnský Devětsil: multimediální přesahy umělecké avantgardy (Brno Devětsil: Multimedia Overlaps of the Artistic Avant-Garde) has been published by the Moravian Gallery in Brno to accompany the eponymous exhibition…
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The Relation of Photography and Art in Practice Podle přírody! (After Nature!) by the historian of photography Petra Trnková addresses the relationship of photography and the arts in the 19th century, working mostly with material derived from Czech collections…
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The publication Jedinečnost a reprodukce fotografického obrazu (On the Uniqueness and Reproduction of the Photographic Image) represents the theoretical component of Ondřej Přibyl’s dissertation thesis for the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, Prague (UMPRUM)…
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Photography is one of Karel Císař’s frequently revisited topics. In the afterword to his book Abeceda věcí: Poznámky k modernímu a současnému umění (The Alphabet of Things: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art), he describes it as a supplement to What is Photography?, an anthology published in 2004 under his editorship…
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The new monograph dedicated to the work of Markéta Luskačová (b. 1944) begins with her cycle Poutníci / Pilgrims (1964–1972), dedicated to the people who changed the artist’s life. As a young girl of nineteen, who had been told at school that attending church was wrong, she encountered a procession of pilgrims in Slovakia heading towards the ancient pilgrimage site at Levoča…
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Sophie Berrebi begins her book by mentioning her own parents and grandparents. We learn, amongst other things, that her maternal grandmother completed her dissertation under Roland Barthes and, more importantly, that she owned a Citroen model that is immortalised in Barthes’ collection of essays Mythologies…
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The monograph of the photographer Pavel Dias (born in 1938), which was published last year by Karolinum Press, highlights, amongst other things, how much the world has changed since the time his generation stood at the helm…
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Last autumn, MARA Publishing, in cooperation with KANT Publishing, released the monograph of one of the most original Czech photographers – Pavel Mára. The more than 300 pages of this publication, prepared with excellent graphics and in very good print quality, present not only reproductions of all of Mára’s most important works, but also the artist’s complete biography and bibliography…
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‘You Press the Button, We Do the Rest’ is a sentence that, according to David Campany, is most likely responsible for starting the story of travel photography – and not just in America. George Eastman of Kodak fame used it for the company’s campaign in 1888 to attract people to amateur photography…
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I’m Not a Photographer is a book full of paradoxes, and sometimes even slightly irritating. It’s not a catalogue of the exhibition curated by Jiří Pátek at the Moravian Gallery in Brno…
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Until 2002, the View from the Window in Le Gras was considered to be the world’s oldest preserved photograph. It affects us not only with its special (aesthetic) strength, but also makes us uncertain about our understanding of the photo as such…
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Photographs taken by scientists tend to be a bit boring; they do not tell you much, unless you are an expert. But a large body of the photographic work by Miloš Spurný, a physiologist, botanist and landscape environmentalist, (1922—1979) is an exception to the rule…
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writes Eugen Wiškovský in one of his texts. Tomáš Pospěch prepared and published an anthology that includes all available writings of this Czech amateur photographer, a teacher by profession and an enthusiastic apostle of modern picture photography, whose theoretical work opposed landscapes with “birches in the breeze”, “all the genres with their sweet little children” “well-behaved still lifes with cast shadows” and who promoted specifically photographed motifs, or “photogenic” motifs to use the terminology of the time, in the spirit of New Objectivity…
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Documentary Across Disciplines 1 is a book connected to the three editions of the Berlin Documentary Forum biennial (2010, 2012, 2014) held under the auspices of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin and curated by Hila Peleg, one of the editors of the book…
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Geoffrey Batchen’s latest book looks at the history of cameraless photography. It is clear that he considers this a completely separate form of photography – one that deserves special attention despite often being placed in the background in traditional histories of the medium…
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A retrospective to honour the anniversary of Josef Sudek (1896–1976) was prepared by Ann Thomas, a curator of the photography collection of the National Gallery of Canada, and another two historians of photography, Vladimír Birgus from the Czech Republic and Ian Jeffrey from the United Kingdom…
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The essay collection Elemental (2016) was released under the auspices of the Gaia project, an independent initiative currently based in Merseyside, England, which is predominantly focused on educating young and old alike about the ecological dire straits currently faced by the peoples of the world…
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Jiří Hanke, photographer and chief dramaturg of the Small Gallery of the Česká Spořitelna savings bank in Kladno, celebrated thirty years of his exhibition activities with a retrospective of portraits of artists that he had invited to his native town on a long-term basis, often repeatedly…
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It is not customary for a reviewer to start out by referencing the text of a colleague in a different periodical. Still, in writing on the exhibition Distance and Proximity held in České Budějovice, I believe it is necessary to draw attention to an article by Josef Moucha entitled Contemporary German Photography: Distance and Proximity, published in the March issue of the Art & Antiques monthly…
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Glocal and Outsiders: Connecting Cultures in Central Europe
Karlín Hall, Thámova 14, Praha 8
25 –16. 9. 2007
Within the labyrinth of a plethora of various projects, pipes, dripping water, unidentified industrial objects, mysterious trap doors, workshops, dusty windowpanes and clean white partitions, photography at the Prague Biennale 3 maintained a highly visible presence…
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he Moravian Gallery in Brno rose to the occasion of Josef Sudek’s double anniversary (of his birth in Kolín on March 17, 1896 and his death in Prague on September 15, 1976) by celebrating it over the winter as well as publishing an eponymous album, The Unknown Josef Sudek: Vintage Prints 1918–1942…
Read moreThe cover of a valuable publication – written and compiled by both a practitioner and a theoretician of photography, Jaroslav Anděl – draws on a reproduction of a photograph by František Illek…
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The Institute of Art History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic brought out the final volume of the monumental Dějiny českého výtvarného umění (History of Czech Visual Arts), the work of twentyseven authors, in two tomes (1144 pages, 997 illustrations)…
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These texts, illuminating the ideological background of the artist Jindřich Štyrský (1899–1942), were edited by Karel Srp with the assistance of Lenka Bydžovská. What is already the second book-form edition of insights previously scattered in magazines or altogether unknown, provides an extraordinary treat for the reader…
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This year of Funke’s Kolín looked at the familiar topic of “family”. It is a strong topic – broad and general and one which fundamentally affects every person. We all define ourselves positively or negatively in relation to our family, enter into standard or non-standard relationships, suffer when we miss it, try or refuse to link our life to those of others…
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Quite logically, the first major photographic exhibition at London’s Tate Britain was devoted to British photography. However, the objective of curators Val Williams and Susan Bright was not to create a definite historical overview, but rather to break through certain rigid boundaries of interpretation…
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Helmut Newton (October 31, 1920 Berlin – Schöneberg – January 23, 2004 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles) did not have a solo exhibition until 1975, in Paris. When the first exhibition of his work was held in Prague, the personal impression he made here was the most memorable: at the press conference the temperamental septuagenarian artist was open and free, and moreover he actively supervised the installation as well as the lighting of the fifty prints of Archives de nuit at the basement gallery of the French Institute in Prague…
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This year, the Czechs can see Invasion 68, a unique collection of photographs by Josef Koudelka (1938). The book was published by Torst and the exhibition was shown at the Old Town Hall in Prague…
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After November 1989, the home scene paid witness to several large exhibitions, which attempted to recapitulate the past. Renowned theorists and curators, in their well-established styles, presented the public with a picture of the last several decades…
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The East Bohemian Gallery in Pardubice has done excellent work to commemorate the underappreciated artist Jiří Toman (1924–1972). The gallery‘s venue at the house U Jonáše has recently exhibited his collages, drawings, small art objects, and above all, photographs – 220 items in total…
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When I explained that History of Light (Dějiny světla) was supposed to be a novel, the shop assistant remarked, from between the non-fiction shelves, something about a misleading title…
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The history of the last several decades has placed photography in a particularly contradictory situation. On the one hand, there is photography that has become part and parcel of art, comprised in the collections of the most important museums around the world and selling for astronomic prices, while on the other side of the spectrum there are myriads of documentary photographs we encounter daily and whose value more often than not coincides with the value of the transmitted information…
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The publication accompanying the exquisite eponymous exhibition at the Moravian Gallery in Brno (held between October 18, 2013–January 19, 2014) is divided into two parts. In part one Antonín Dufek outlines Jaromír Funke both as a personality and photographer in an essay titled “Professor of the Avantgarde,” section 2 presents an extensive anthology of Funke’s own writing introduced by Dufek’s editorial note…
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Jindřich Toman ranks among the top experts on Czech and Central European Modernist and Avant-garde book culture. He proves this once again in his new bound collection on photography and photo-montage in Czech media, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s…
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From 5 February till 25 April Štěpán Grygar showed an extensive selection of his photos at the Fotofest Headquarters in Houston. Wendy Watriss prepared the exhibit as curator and conceived it as a dialogue between two artists, whose works are connected by the term: visualism…
Read moreJosef Sudek once said: “The charm of all things lies in their mystery.” Of the many clues to his work, this may well be the principal one. When ruminating on the reception of Sudek’s work by audiences in Buenos Aires, I realized that it is in fact the very moment of mystery which is a common trait of the works of two Argentine writers: Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar…
Read moreWhen the young, Slovak photographer, Martin Kollár, held his second independent exhibit in Bratislava’s Palffy Palace in 2001 during the Bratislava Month of Photography, it created a small sensation…
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Stává se nepsaným pravidlem, že umělec kolem šedesáti let začíná bilancovat svou tvorbu, a tato ohlédnutí většinou vykrystalizují do retrospektivní monografie. Čas je pro Jiřího Hankeho trpělivým přítelem a ani v tomto případě fotograf nikam nespěchal…
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Miroslav Jodas (*1932) belongs to today’s forgotten generation of Czech photographers that entered the profession during the 1960s with a programme loosely extending beyond the aesthetic of the “everyday“ documentary…
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Very few photographers – not just from our country – enjoyed the respect and understanding that Jan Reich did. And I don’t have in mind here the fact that such giants as Bohumil Hrabal or Milan Kundera wrote the forewords to his books…
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“… I longed to be a poet, a painter, a sculptor or perhaps a tenor, yet I was too young to do so and mainly I lacked the talent and the possibilities to acquire a Muse for myself. At the age of fourteen my dad bought me a small camera and from the start I felt that somewhere I could at least temporarily find a means of self-realisation…
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The exhibit, Outside (Mimo zónu) appeared as if it were not prepared by a curator but rather a sniper, who could hit a titmouse spot on from a distance of two kilometres. Precisely targeted at the minimalist, non- figural – partially conceptual – creations of the 1970s and 1980s, it speaks of the normalisation period with much greater persuasion than the concurrently running mega-retrospective, Once upon a Time in the East (Tenkrát na východě)…
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In September the first issue of the Czechoslovak edition of Vice magazine hit the newsstands…
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The twentieth anniversary of November events seems to be a suitable opportunity for general balancing (assessment). This trend has not escaped even the cultural sphere, where different exhibits, more or less related to this theme, began to appear…
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Autumn is usually full of photographic festivals. In Bratislava the annual Month of Photography takes place, in Paris there is Paris Photo and in Kolín there is the photographic festival called Funke’s Kolín…
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In 1999, ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Piotr Piotrowski described the former East as “the grey zone of Europe.” “There is no doubt that the historico-geographical coordinates of Central Europe are in a state of flux,” he writes, “that we are experiencing both historical and geographical transformation, that we are between two different times, between two different spatial shapes…
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Fortunately I do not yet belong to the generation that has to frequently write obituaries. But in the case of Anna Fárová this is a duty that exceeds a generation gap of almost fifty years. Even though it is increasingly indisputable that even historians and art theoreticians influence the shape (history) of art to a large degree, it is not common that they in fact organise monographic exhibits and publish collected documents…
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In the book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, dating from 1951 (1996 – Czech version) philosopher-politician, Hannah Arendt, describes the dangerously similar features of German Nazism and Stalinist Socialism…
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Itʼs nothing new that almost every generation of professional historians writes their own history, their interpretation of the past, influenced by the social and political presence and their knowledge of the period, in which the author-historian works…
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Last year, the prestigious MIT Press published a comprehensive volume by Gwen Allen, an art historian currently at San Francisco State University, dedicated to magazines published by artists (Artists’ Magazines)…
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Historian Filip Wittlich works in the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague. He is co-author of several monographs and studies Czech and Czechoslovak history of the past two centuries. In the book, Fotografie-přímý svědek?! (Photography-Direct Witness?!), he explores the medium of photography as a source…
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Navzdory vročení 2010 vyšla kniha a z mlhy zjevily se útesy čínské… koncem roku 2011. Oč se jedná, napoví podtitul Obraz Číny v prvních fotografiích. Zdržení publikace způsobila obtížnost identifikace zobrazených míst…
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The Intimate Circle in Contemporary Czech Photography (Vnitřní okruh v současné české fotografii) is a catalogue accompanying the eponymous exhibition at City Gallery Prague (June–August 2013), with reprises at the Month of Photography in Bratislava, and the Museum of Art in Olomouc…
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The edition tranzit series brought out a monograph of the authorial dual of Czech “non-photography” – Lukáš Jasanský and Martin Polák. Soberly and in chronological order it presents the twenty-seven photographic cycles that Jasanský and Polák have produced between 1986 and the present, with several additional “bonuses” – cycles that the artists do not currently include in their collected works…
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The labyrinth fascinates us with its many meanings and possibilities for interpretation. It draws you in but does not wish to release, it imprisons, yet still offers hope for “leaving.” After all Theseus was victorious – truth be told with the help of Ariadne – but his example allows us to count on a sort of string that will guide us through the confusion of hallways…
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The thirty-fourth collection of books by Fototorst contains the best of Peter Župník’s (1961) works. The author of the book’s foreword is an art historian, Lucia L. Fišerová (1977), who first presented him in Fotograf two years ago with portfolio (No…
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Work, work and more work. This is man’s fate that evokes probably the same amount of contradictions as do love or photography. Whether it’s futile or useful to work is a similarly meaningless question as asking whether it makes sense to take pictures…
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Writing history is a big responsibility, as long as we still believe in the power of words, as long as we are convinced that what we’re writing is not irrelevant, and that culture (civilisation) without words would cease to exist…
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An exhibition, focusing on contemporary Czech photography of the past two decades, took place in the Rudolfinum Gallery in Prague. Curator Pavel Vančát chose to call it Mutating Medium, which clearly establishes and expresses the direction in which his artistic considerations on the state of photography in our environment are headed…
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The publishing house Kant has published a sizable book for the Prague exhibition of the work of Miroslav Tichý. It interestingly oscillates between a monograph and an apotheosis. The exhibition from the collections of Gianfranco Sanguinetti and his friends presented over 200 of Tichý’s photographs and several drawings in a relatively small space in the second floor of the Old Town Hall (which the Prague Gallery otherwise leases for exhibits of younger people)…
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The title Technical Image on a Painter’s Easel (Technický obraz na malířských štaflích) is reminiscent of the famous pronouncement by Alfred H. Wall during his lecture on the relationship between the photographic medium and the fine arts, delivered on December 15, 1859: ’Light in photography serves the same role as the brush in painting…
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Jaroslav Kučera has rediscovered several of his forgotten colleagues and presents their legacies in book and exhibition titled War Photographers / Fotografové války 1914–1918. He cites in his introduction to the book that the „images by Gustav Brož, Jan Myšička, Jenda Rajman and Karel Neubert are genuine, experienced, and they have great artistic value…
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Viktor Kolář (1941) became this year’s laureate of the title, Personality of Czech Photography, bestowed by the Association of Professional Photographers of the Czech Republic. (Bearers from previous years were also mentioned – Josef Koudelka, Anna Fárová, Jan Reich in memoriam, Antonín Dufek and other big names)…
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The Nová Paka Municipal Museum organized a retrospective to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Miroslav Hák (1911–1978), famous for his surrealistic experience and membership in the illegal, wartime Group 42…
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The publishing project, Peeping Tom’s Digest (www.peepingtomgalerie.com ), follows – in addition to the realisation of smaller artist monographs – one main objective: observing and discovering specific creative scenes, yet in no way in the sense of a popularising guide, rather according to a special, empirical key based on communication…
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To briefly describe not only the importance and magic of the work of Miroslav Tichý but also the periphery of his acceptance and refusal is an impossible task. This is a story that remains creative and incomplete, like some unfinished novel about an artist who formed his own hidden world founded upon disconnection and waywardness…
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Let us assume that there exists no such thing as an ethnic or national art within the context of contemporary global art. Instead of using the designation “Polish art”, let us use the term “art from Poland”…
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The world-renowned photographer Josef Koudelka (born 1938) has published an album of dreams. For he started working on his cycle Gypsies, as he has never ceased to call the Roma, already half a century ago…
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After the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, the Moravian Gallery in Brno can pride itself in having the second most well stocked depository of Czech art photography, housing almost twenty-seven thousand items…
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The Seidel photographic studio was formerly a highly distinguished brand, associated with postcards of Český Krumlov and the greater Šumava region. A pair of monographs now present a revelatory selection of the artistic legacy of the Seidels, both father and son…
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Although The Civil Contract of Photography was first published already several years ago, its new paperback edition represents a good opportunity for it to reach a broader audience. Its author, the Israeli theorist, curator and documentary filmmaker Ariella Azoulay addresses the theme of documentary and reportage photography not only through the theory of the medium, but above all from the perspective of political philosophy…
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The Prague reprisal of the Bratislava exhibition, Punctum / Barthes Diary (photographs and films) offers yet another idea on how to view photography from a different angle and in a differently organised context…
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The present monograph is not the first to commemorate the legacy of Jindřich Marco (1921–2000), but who today is aware of his fate? This pocket-format book contains less than ninety reproductions, but it is important for the mere fact that it forms the 36th volume of the “encyclopaedia in installments” published by Torst…
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Agreeable design, 375 pages including index and bibliography, 102 texts structured chronologically in 6 chapters, DOST Publishers, 2011, edited by Tomáš Pospěch. This about sums up this new anthology, which looks back at the era of early art photography and skims the surface of the era that followed…
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May it be argued that a parallel history of photography began being written in connection with the formation of conceptual art? At a time when the institutionalization of photography, qua a specific artistic medium (the allocation of photography collections, galleries, university curricula), was occurring by degrees, conceptual art revealed the possibility of viewing photography in a new way by beginning to consistently render uncertain and exceed the medium’s traditional boundaries…
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*10. 3. 1926 — †17. 3. 2012
Dagmar Hochová’s photographs, which I’m actually looking at right now, are atomic, full of energy, funny. They are kind, they burn with the artist’s detached view…
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