Fotograf Magazine

Much has already been written about photographer, Peter Župník, and his involvement in the generational sub-grouping, “Slovak New Wave”. The latter through its activities at Prague’s FAMU in the mid-1980s stirred up the, until then, calm waters of Czechoslovak creative photography. Despite – or perhaps in fact because – this was no organised group with no specifically-outlined programme (in fact the Slovak New Wave was a far cry from the manifestos typical of modernist movements), the group had a relatively unified visual language characterised by both a formal and content-focused “lightening up” of the nudes and still-life genres, which represented one of the first expressions of post-modernism on the photography scene at the time. The complicated arrangement of in-front-of-camera reality, a marked narrativity and image metaphorical quality, fragmentation of the body, and the removal of taboos through ironic visual and text commentaries, technological eclecticism using their own creative art processes (collage, montage, touch-up painting, text commentaries…) – all of these made the photography of Miro Švolík, Rudo Prekop, Tono Stano or Peter Župník examples par excellence of this new image discourse.