Fotograf Magazine

Petr Faster (1952) is not amongst those whose seek to draw the public’s attention to what they photographed and where. However, he does take the high road in certain things and thus did not keep his beginnings secret from me. It turns out that, starting in the mid-1970s, he explored the spectrum of possibilities offered by his medium, ranging from various genre scenes to abstraction.

He made his artistic debut in 1984 at the Fotochema Gallery in Prague with his exhibition The Same / In a Different Way / In a Different Way / The Same. This premiere show was a retrospective evaluation of the preceding five years (1978–1983), in which he started to distance himself from previously defined themes. It also presaged the following phases of his work. Nevertheless, he did return to this first one in 2013, when the Pecka Gallery presented his original enlargements in a new arrangement (with the modified title of The Same / In a Different Way). His dynamic shots did not lose any of their impressiveness, thanks to their rich black-and-white stylization, in which the depth of the sharpness of the image plays an important role, highlighting the centres of the photographer’s attention, and, consequently, those of the viewer. Faster himself characterized this particular creative phase at the time it was revisited as: “Abstraction, later labelled visualism, where excerpts of reality served to accentuate the abstract game even more.”