Fotograf Magazine

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. You can get an ill feeling from both, just as both can help you achieve wealth and be popular with women. But there is one small difference: while work is enjoying a big boom, the prestige of photography has dropped. More perceptive photographers are asking themselves what, if anything at all, should I photograph. However, what else in the world could I do? Take pictures and work. Work and take pictures and sometimes simply just write about it, even if right up to the deadly limit of Fotograf magazine’s editorial deadline.

Lukáš Jasanský a Martin Polák decided to celebrate photographic work not just with all photographs, but with all photographers as well. They took pictures, developed them, blew them up, dried them on the line and cropped 10,000 images. Both alone and with their own hands (even if perhaps Markéta Othová helped). Ten-thousand shots of the counter on an old tape-recorder, from zero up to nine-thousand nine-hundred ninety-nine. They exhibited all the photos in spring 2010 on one floor of the U Bílého jednorožce Gallery in Klatovy. On the exhibition’s second floor they added a not yet exhibited collection of photos of men from the 1980s. It creates an overall logical impression. Either the men have just finished work or they are headed off to some sort of work. And as if that were not enough, you could find excrement – under a brown cloth – on a mass of photographs on the gallery’s parquet floors. Whew, that was work.

Lukáš Jasanský a Martin Polák decided to celebrate photographic work not just with all photographs, but with all photographers as well. They took pictures, developed them, blew them up, dried them on the line and cropped 10,000 images. Both alone and with their own hands (even if perhaps Markéta Othová helped). Ten-thousand shots of the counter on an old tape-recorder, from zero up to nine-thousand nine-hundred ninety-nine. They exhibited all the photos in spring 2010 on one floor of the U Bílého jednorožce Gallery in Klatovy. On the exhibition’s second floor they added a not yet exhibited collection of photos of men from the 1980s. It creates an overall logical impression. Either the men have just finished work or they are headed off to some sort of work. And as if that were not enough, you could find excrement – under a brown cloth – on a mass of photographs on the gallery’s parquet floors. Whew, that was work.

For the exhibition focusing on the subject of the artists issued a reprint of their thesis work, which they did not successfully complete during their studies at Prague’s FAMU. It’s called Vtipy a reportáže (Jokes and Reports) and shows that Jasanský and Polák have been clear about their views on work and photography since their student years. For twenty-five years they have photographed and exhibited something that might suggest to us: aren’t we doing something a bit superfluous here?

By the way, this exhibition on work was not the only one in the Czech Republic this year. Up till January 2011 an exhibition by Jan Nálevka at Brno’s Moravia Gallery will continue to ask similar questions about the lack of purpose (randomness) of artistic work. It just traded photo paper for quadrille paper.

Lukáš Jasanský, Martin Polák – 10 000 chlapi (10,000 men), curator – Pavel Vančát, U Bílého jednorožce Gallery, Klatovy, 2010

Jan Freiberg