Fotograf Magazine

In 2001, Stanislav Doležal founded Svět Publishers, with the purpose of bringing out the legacy of František Drtikol (1883-1961). The photograp­her’s present album was preceded by Journals and Letters 1914-1918, Dedicated to Eliška Janska (2001), Spiritual Journey (2004), and Eyes Wide Open (2002). Aside from Czech, the latter (i.e., the artists pedago­gical legacy) comes out simultaneously in English, German and French versions. All these volumes have in common outstanding graphic design and bookbinding. If with the first and second of the above-mentioned books a mere hundred copies were issued as numbered prints, the present book is a bibliophile edition exclusively (the work of designer Radana Lencova).

With a print run of 300 copies, the fine 250 g paper was processed in such a way as to evoke the tarnish of the unique sheets of the photographer’s own work. The format, 200 x 323 mm, corresponds to the original. Although the publisher strove to correct this edition “in such a way that one could enter into the spiritual dimension of the original,” as he writes in the introduction, still the 973 photographs reproduced here do not strike one with a fake patina (even though time has certainly marked their tonality), as they were printed into slots in black-and-white duplex format.

Drtikol’s work album was created in such a way that he reproduced his positives on glass plates (mostly in 120 x 163 mm format). He would copy about four to ten images at once. He would then cut apart the contact sheets and group them according to their nature or theme. Thus on the first three sheets inscribed “Calavas” he pasted 5, 13 and 12 reproductions, approx. 55 x 45 mm in size. (Calavas is the surname of a French publisher, who was preparing Drtikol’s first bibliophile edition for two years beginning in the fall of 1927, a date also coinciding with Drtikol starting his workbook). The ensuing sixty-five sheets were gra­dually filled, and the manuscript notes proliferated Nana with a hoop”, “for the pharmacist”, etc.).

The art historian Anna Farova, who some time ago received the album from the photographer’s estate and eventually donated it to the collections of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, contributed the second of the two introductory essays. She writes here that the contacts of reproductions on numbered pages were created chiefly in the late 1920s, whereas the sheets “A” to “If date to the mid-1930s, when the artist had already dispensed with live models. The album makes but sporadic recourse to early work.

Since this is exclusively Drtikol’s independent work, the workbook is a remarkable glossary of ideas and explorations in the artists final decade working as a photographer. Take for example the series featuring the cover motif of both the Czech and English monographs on Drtikol (Birgus V Praha: KANT 2000): images accompanying Trny (Thorns, 1927) have so many phases as to make them look like they portray a falling figure… Yet the album could very well meet the purposes of research in an electronic format.

The observation of the “spiritual dimension of the original” depends entirely on the faithfulness of reproduction to the original photographs. If the project at hand was not another Drtikol monograph, it is natural that the unique prints from large studio plates that the artist would put on display were not scanned for pre-printing purposes. It is nonetheless a pity that the publishers did not at least scan the illustrations from smaller plates of reproductions, the semi-finished product of the working album. For these were also donated by Anna Farova to the same museum; and would be particularly suitable for the quality of relay optical information of Drtikol’s prints. If each page was printed using two separate printing technologies, production had to involve montage anyway. It is a paradox: what is ultimately more faithfully evoked in the final book is not the black-and-white duplex prints of the photographs that are the focus of the publication, but instead the full-color patina of the background with Drtikol’s simplistic sketches of twenty shots, of which the artist did not have reproductions.

Josef Moucha