MIROSLAV TICHY

The Forbidden Gaze


There are photographs that easily find their way into books, galleries and the academic community. They are deemed by fate to comprise another chapter in the history of photography. But there are many others whose path to light becomes constantly hindered by obstacles. Scattered within trashy studios, dusty thrift shops and forgotten family albums they call out for attention as hidden treasures ready to confide their secrets to us. Even if faded and in bad shape, the encounter with these old photographs produces tremendous joy. In our excavation-like attempt, we feel like archaeologists digging into the past. What the journey will bring is rarely certain, but, before a handful of photographs literally “stained” by years of adventures within boxes soaked by damp, everything comes into place. We can feel the shutter of the camera, not to say the aura of lives, stories and shared emotions. We can feel what Roland Barthes once described as the dreamful transportation of the “then” into the “now”–the past reviving into an eternal present.
Travelling through bits and pieces, our gaze is after the unseen, the unknown, the non-appreciated. We are longing for this magic revelation of the invisible to take place before our eyes. It is precisely this “unfinished business”—the “to-be-unfolded” fate of thousands of photographs—that renders the whole thing so enchanting to us. This is what photography is clearly all about: a story without an end. Throughout its history pretty much has happened, much more is to be discovered and, what's more, there are infinite ways to tell the same story. In this respect, photographs, when contemplated in different eras and contexts, become “reactivated” as distinct beings, embellished with novel visual properties. In doing so, not only they but also the human eye behind the camera is conferred, even if late, the posthumous glory it deserves on the shelves of history.

Miroslav Tichý: the man with the trimmed suit, a Diogenes-like figure, emerging out of oblivion… For over fifty years he lived in total reclusion in Kyjov, a small Moravian town. Unknown to most, he assumed the role of the misfit. For decades, neighbours avoided him, while the Communist regime's police paid him frequent visits. In his non-conformist way, Tichý embodied the opposite of the Socialist Man—a reactionary dissident, an Eastern-block hippy who was constantly turning his back on the political and social system that surrounded him. If others worked, Tichý would spend his day on the roof of his mother's house enjoying the sun. If others claimed their ideological integrity, he would simply not care. Yet, despite appearances, Tichý has never been just another lost soul. On the contrary, he has meticulously “carved” his path in life. Choices and decisions were aptly adopted a long time ago.
Born in 1926, Miroslav Tichý studied in the Academy of Arts in Prague, but after the Communist takeover in 1948, he sensed that the way things had turned was simply not for him. He retreated to his hometown, pursuing a solitary, poor existence away from public lights, exhibitions and the espionage paranoia of the Stalinist era. In the fifties, Tichý led a relatively normal, quiet life at his parents' house: he kept working on his modernist figural paintings and even participated in a group show in 1958, the only one ever; but in between, intervals for psychiatric treatment in clinics were beginning to become a routine. Then, in the early 1960s, the final rupture took place. Tichý progressively started neglecting his appearance and disregarding any rule of personal hygiene—he, the son of a tailor, would let his hair and beard grow and dress in a ragged black suit. As the chasm between him and the world grew bigger, so too did the repression exercised upon him by local authorities.
Miroslav Tichý spent a total of eight years in jail and suffered all kinds of persecutions just for being different. However, nothing would put his artistic spirit down. By the time of his eviction from his studio in 1972, Tichý had already dropped “painting” for “painting with light”. With the help of old, recycled cameras and lenses adapted with Plexiglas and tins he began photographing the leitmotif of his economical figure drawings: women! The yard of the family home provided the space for a laboratory and darkroom. Every day Tichý would walk for hours pressing the button whenever the lens asked him to. The streets became his studio. By nightfall he would be back home, developing his rolls of film. If essential photographic equipment and chemicals were missing, he looked for them among disregarded materials. The rest was fabricated out of paper tubes, plastic drain-pipes and cardboard. That was daily routine from the late 1960s until 1985, when Tichý gave up any involvement with photography for good.
The photographic oeuvre of Miroslav Tichý became the focus of international attention thanks to Roman Bauxbaum. Back in the sixties, when Bauxbaum was still a young child, he used to share much of his time with his peculiar neighbour. The Bauxbaum family was something of a patron for Tichý. Roman's uncle was a university friend and psychiatrist of Tichý, while his grandfather rented him the family attic room as a studio. It was there where Tichý would show young Roman how to fabricate pinhole cameras out of shoeboxes. Shortly after the Prague Spring, the Bauxbaum family emigrated to Switzerland and contact was lost with Tichý. Then in 1981, Roman—now a psychiatrist and artist with a Swiss passport—came back for a visit, the first of many to follow during which he befriended Tichý, spending hours going through his photographs and negatives.
Acknowledging the artistic integrity of the man and his work, Bauxbaum decided to take the task upon his shoulders and to let the art world know about it. In 2004 the Foundation Tichý Ocean was created. Since then, a series of publications and exhibitions in Seville, Arles, Zurich, London, alongside last summer's retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and this winter's show, “The essence of Forbidden Photography”, at the recently launched venue of Ivory Press Art+Books in Madrid, have caused sensation, and Miroslav Tichý is now considered to be one of the most significant discoveries of the last few years. In the meantime, life goes by peacefully in the small provincial town of Kyjov. Tichý has not come out of his village for the last fifty years nor does he plan to, less so when it comes to attending his own shows. He prefers to be “a prophet of decay and a pioneer of chaos” at home.

Women everywhere: at the bus stop, at the square of the church, in the pool; young girls and women walking, chatting, sun-bathing. Scenes from everyday life without any special charm obtain an exceptionally lyrical dimension through the camera of Miroslav Tichý. With their dreamful, ghostly quality they are diluted in the atmosphere, erasing dullness and ugliness in a way only words are capable of. It is impossible, given the era (1960s-1985) during which the whole of Tichý's photographic work was produced, not to connect these pictures with the prevailing historical circumstances. It is impossible, when watching time inscribing its stains on their texture, not to think of Tichý's fellow Czech and near-contemporary Milan Kundera, who, better than anyone else, captured the emotional alienation of the individual in Communist Czechoslovakia.
Semi-obsessive individuals on the fringes of resignation, mechanically executing their duties… Kundera's characters have a lot in common indeed with the female figures emerging subtly from the weary surface of Tichý's prints. These photographs are uneasy to read. Sensual and human, banal and profound at the same time, they carry with them an “unbearable lightness of being”. Should their interpretation lack an historical and political value, this is purely because Tichý has always been very far from the expressly political. Likewise, within Tichý's gaze there is no pleasure principle at work. Here again, voyeurism and desire become another mere excuse to define the bars of the cage that has always irremediably separated Tichý from reality, while taking on the dimensions of a much more generic argument specific to his era: the fundamental alienation among the human being and its historical present.
A sort of inevitable misperception of the external world imbues these pictures in their formal defects. Female bodies behind fences and silhouettes evoking the nurses of the balnearies who appear in the novels of Milan Kundera; the act of surrendering oneself to boredom and triviality; wrong people in wrong places who, deemed to suffer a misrecognition and displacement of their roles, choose trivial stories, trivial loves, and trivial endings as substitutes for life. Sensual women, aged and young, skinny and plump, aware and unaware of being gazed at—what difference does it make when the very gaze is damaged? Deviating to a non-consumed voyeurism, facing oneself with a desire that even if it were to be consumed, it would be as to discover the absence of desire behind the desire: “A woman, for me, is a motif. Nothing else interests me”, says Tichý. Far away from the fetish of the “éternel féminine”, this is all about women of Socialist Realism—women comrades. Tichý's wistful look abides them: “The erotic is just a dream anyway. The world is only an illusion, our illusion”. And so are ideologies. The horror before the mechanization of human consciousness and emotions is what finally clashes with these very images of bodies lying about Tichý's studio—rats and mice eating away their material relics. For the artist this is the fate that all his work should encounter, the challenge of surviving the waste-paper basket the same way he does. What is left now from all this past of fear are just these “small objects of obsession”. In the memory of Miroslav Tichý there is nothing else left save a tangible nothingness.

Tichý is looking at us through the fence. Even today when the old enemies are gone—among them, the policemen who on Communist holidays would knock on his door and take him to the asylum for “provisional normalization”—even today when international recognition has been achieved, the eighty-year old Tichý still opts for maintaining a safe distance, and, from this distance, he mocks us sardonically for paying homage to the artist and his work. “I am a star! A big star!” he laughs. And he is right to. Before a contemporary art panorama ruled by the aphorisms of market-strategists and pseudo-intellectuals, such a posture of activism and subversion becomes more current than ever.
Is Miroslav Tichý a photographer? Is he a painter? His art does not obey any strict categorization. It is not mere photography, painting or drawing, but rather a life-long performance: a kind of bio-philosophical approach, an exhibition of self-constructing madness and personal obsession, far more compromised, consistent and original than that of many others. Tichý has been done with photography since 1985. One day, he was through with it in the same way he had been with painting back in the late sixties. He was already on his way to the final touch, he had finally solved the mystery: the actual piece of work is himself!
Blurry pictures versus rotten frontiers and identities: their uncanny effect brings to our mind the out-of-focus visual universe of Bill Jacobson, the Pictorialists, even the screaming agony expressed in the self-lived diaries of Antoine d'Agata. The blurry images of Miroslav Tichý are not derivatives of a programmatic production. Under-developed and full of technical and formal shortcomings, they are the result of pure impulse, neglectful handling and a primitive photographic technology. And yet, their uniqueness resides precisely in their strikingly unusual formal properties. Maybe, after all, sharpness is all worn out; maybe this has always been the lens of the world—a lens made out of tins, eaten out by mice and silverfish, disrupting vision with its filthiness. Paradoxically, when we find ourselves looking at the surviving old photographs of Tichý, which show him as a perfectly normal young man enjoying the company of his fellows in the university years, their clearness scares us. An uncanny displacement of topos takes place, as if the world was heading irremediably towards the opposite direction.

One of the first solo shows dedicated to Tichý suggested a kinship between him and Jacques Henri Lartigue. Gaze and women do admittedly link the two artists, yet each one is positioned in opposite poles within the social hierarchy. The gaze as joy of life, this is Lartigue. What by contrast, predominates in Tichý is an obsessive self-confinement in one's mind. There is no way out, no space for feelings or any emotional expression whatsoever. Tichý definitively does not belong to the world he captures with his camera the way Lartigue did. His is a constant struggle to bridge the gap, to produce an order of elementary likeness so that an elementary communication can take place between us and his pictures. “Look for the closest thing to reality”, this is what Tichý is looking out for.
Bikinis and shorts, female bodies and then the hand which improves contours with a pencil, or which uses hand-made mats and frames as a way of putting things together. Even in the chaos there is a need for order! Blurs, spots, errors... “The worse the technique, the better the art!” That is the secret of Miroslav Tichý. “And for that, you need a bad camera. If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you’re doing worse than anyone else in the whole world!” argues Tichý, but should we believe him? Rather than “defect”, maybe the secret of his work could well be this frenetic self-exile, whereby the artist's life lies at the mercy of Art. Hence the artist as a living piece invalidating life; hence, the hermit life of Tichý. The key is silence and self-withdrawal in order to trap the song of this world. Let us suspend thought for a moment and wonder: how many artists are able to take this compromise so far today?

It is difficult to place ourselves honestly before the artistic artifacts of Tichý. We like these pictures because they come out of the other world. Old photographs in their hand-made mats and hand-decorated wooden frames, these are the objects we carry with us, the ones we treasure. We like them as specimens of a reality that provides space for reflection and imagination. We face them with relief precisely because we know that it is us here and him there. Desire, disclosure, a pleasant suffocation; art keeps its treasures for a few. The frontier that separates us grows bigger. At the end of the day there is nothing left. Tichý becomes lost in the depth of the horizon…


All pictures: © Miroslav Tichý / Foundation Tichý Ocean

Represented by:
Foundation Tichý Ocean


Text by Natasha Christia

Published in Eyemazing 02/09

VLADIMIR ŽIDLICKY

Beneath the Skin



One of the most significant editorial revelations of the last Month of Photography in Bratislava has been a beautifully compiled monograph that encompasses the trajectory of one of the most prominent presences in contemporary Czech fine-art photography. The man behind the book, which has been chosen from among some 160 publications as the best to have appeared in Central and Eastern Europe in the last two years, is none other than Vladimir Židlický (Hodonín, 1945). Židlický was singled out by the international jury for his highly personal and intuitive photographic language that seems to uncover the secrets of an incorruptibly intangible world beneath skin-deep appearances. His elaborate photographic tableaux of nymph-like figures, whose naked bodies become diluted and/or disrupted through movement, culminate in a hybrid amalgam of pictorial and symbolic references that negotiate corporeality and the humanness of the soul from an existentialist point of view.

In the early seventies Židlický quit painting to make his breakthrough in photography but it was not until the eighties that he attracted international attention. Since then, his work has been featured in galleries and museums, forming part of public and private collections all over the world. Despite this, Židlický's disinterest in self-promotion has worked against the accessibility of his oeuvre to the broader public. “My concern is to fulfil my creative ambitions to the fullest and convey to the world what I want”, he explains. “Life is too short and I don’t wish to waste it on marketing my work”.

Židlický's medium of expression is analogue photography. Beautifully processed, toned gelatine-silver prints—and following recent experiments, coloured—his photos point to a state of dreamful deconstruction. The parts of the nude female bodies that emerge subtly out of the perforated and stained surfaces evoke the misty works of Jöel-Peter Witkin. Though the two artists have never so much as communicated or coincided geographically, they appear to share specific concerns and fugitive encounters of coincidence that considerably reinforce their perpetual association. Back in the early eighties, a curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art came up with an idea for a show with a particular ambition. There would be, on the one hand, the provocative and intransigent Witkin with his outcasts, freaks and dead corpses; and, on the other, the pure, ethereal, yet deeply dramatic and passionate Židlický—the overall theme being bodily deconstruction in its post-modern uncanniness. Although this exhibition was never carried out, another show drawing upon the very same principle was held some years later at the Robert Koch Gallery, this time featuring Vladimir Židlický and Judy Coleman. The idea of the Western versus the Eastern gaze was still intact, and this is precisely what is of interest here, namely the envisioning of Vladimir Židlický on the Eastern (European) side of the track in terms of origin, aesthetic approach and conceptual sensibility. The juxtaposition in question provides us with a solid base for reflection when attempting to come to terms with the nature of Židlický's oeuvre.

If Jöel-Peter Witkin's bodies of misfits jar against the walls of post-modern nihilism, encountering beneath the contemporary peau douce what Slavoj Žižek once described as an interior gnawed away by worms, Vladimir Židlický admittedly seems to follow a rather Classical, not to say Romantic ideal of beauty that does not seemingly allow too much space for provocation. Židlický's beautifully arranged torsos and dynamically arranged compositions of bodily clusters draw their fundamental iconological references from Symbolism and the Renaissance pictorial tradition, whilst being imbued by a strict sense of geometrical composition, formal abstraction and meticulously calculated anarchy that owes a lot to the Czech photographic legacy of the nude. Židlický has never denied neither the deep ties with his fine arts background, nor the influence that the symbolically exalted iconography of his near-contemporary group Epos might have exercised on him during his early years in Brno. Still, this apparently ongoing conformism with tradition is quickly compensated. A sort of existential divine-driven drama throws the protagonists of these pictures onto the verge of immateriality. A romantic melancholy impregnates these bodies. Form drifts aside, giving its place to the mysticism of the being. While the earthliness of Witkin's bodies resonates in an American-Indian bio-philosophy, Židlický's ethereal gaze heads up towards the sky in search of an Orient-inspired metaphysics of the body. In a similar way to his antecedent Frantisek Drtikol, he is looking for a wistful body beyond the constraints of material infatuations—not despite but after life and death.

The undisputable protagonist of these images is the “éternel féminine”, namely, woman as the embodiment of fertility and as the mysterious intangible “other”. Possessed by a deep symbolic value, female nudity becomes the material expression of an Eden-like paradisiacal state of being, irremediably bound to the subconscious. “For me, the female body is an absolute symbol, the sole irreplaceable symbol, and I don’t know anything that would match it”, Židlický points out. “It represents the ultimate bearer of sexuality, the fundamental building block, the motor without which we wouldn’t exist. It intrigues me; it is perpetually mysterious and exciting, a permanent source of inspiration”. Yet, despite the sensual nakedness prevailing these pictures, sexuality, as we know it today, is absent from Vladimir Židlický's gaze. His work stands in a striking opposition to the erotically charged, self-claiming feminine identity that dominates the contemporary patterns of representation both in commercial and in fine art photography. In his eyes, artifice and masquerade relegate femininity to a sterile construct, lacking sexual purity, sensuality and animal warmth. His whole set of representations defies any materialist view of the world for a rather purist approach, whereby flesh becomes the ground for psyche and spirit.

Židlický's work may clearly depart from a stylistic formal point of view, aesthetically allied with traditional fine-art photography, but takes an unexpected turn by producing a dislocation of roles on a material level. There is drama emanating not just from the surface of the print but also from the very negative itself. There is an esoteric need pushing Židlický to increase immediacy at any cost. This is the reason he once left aside his brushes for photography. If this new medium were providing infinite possibilities for a closer relation with the external world, Židlický would make the best out of it.

Negative and positive: the original and the copy; the original and the imitation; the mirror and its reflection… Back in the 1920s, the Czech avant-garde propagated the superiority of the purely material qualities of the medium over form and content. To artists such as Jaromír Funke, direct photography epitomized an exceptionally illusory bond with tangible reality as much as hyper-reality, while others such as Jarosalv Rössler elevated the negative and the positive to material surfaces with autonomous properties whereupon the artist's willingness could be projected. The work of Vladimir Židlický, despite being created decades later and developed within a distinct cultural milieu, undoubtedly owes much to this legacy. Židlický 's photographs are above all physical objects: they may allude, in part, to the so-called “photographic momentum”, but the final, decisive touch comes always by means of a manipulation that the negative—the material matrix of the photographic event—suffers. Židlický describes this practice in terms of an “animalistic” need to manipulate, to reach the essence, to affect the original image, to literally cancel the surface in order to bring forward what lies behind, as if the negative were the soul which carried the body, as if everything to be found were there. “I felt that without my additional interventions my intention wasn’t formulated precisely enough, as if the whole truth wasn’t expressed and the message was only on the surface”, he explains. And he continues, providing a full account of his dynamic, intense interventions, “I manipulated the emulsion of the negative mechanically in different ways, even to the point of making holes in them, I painted on the negatives using a paintbrush as well as other means, I laid the negatives over each other to layer them, I worked with inversions of the negative; I exploited all thinkable means that could leave traces on the original image”. This is how his haunting photographic enlargements have been generated over the last four decades.

Manipulation acquires paramount importance in the oeuvre of Vladimir Židlický in the sense that it reinforces the ontological validity of his photographs as artefacts in progress. There are cases in which ten years pass between the birth of a negative and the final image. This is where the factor of time enters. Through mechanical interventions onto the image, deprivations and disappearances take place, as if an unidentifiable time accelerator were at work giving birth to both a temporal and a spatial dislocation. In this respect, these pictures are here and there, memory and present, finished and unfinished at the same time: they are three-dimensional “ready-mades” with infinite conceptual possibilities, travelling through time. What is more, they question themselves from within as much as from without. This is the fundamental premise around which Židlický's commitment with photography has revolved since its very first steps. This has always been the path and the challenge: to build upon the advantage of photography over painting, upon its fleeting dialogue with reality, and complement the whole with an effort to reveal the truth hidden beneath the surface—that intangible truth for which material bodies eventually become dust.

Abstract settings, blurry images—always intelligible and devoid of logic—conquered by motion; emotional maps and the human body itself as battlefield; all in all, drawings of light. This is the way these emotional landscapes of the absurd arise before our eyes. Vladimír Židlický has a lot to say about the existentialist reflection underlying the vibrating iconological ambience of his works, “There is no doubt that my work has been influenced by existential philosophy, which resonated profoundly in the situation we experienced when we were young in the late sixties”, he explains. His generation discovered Sartre, Camus and Dostoyevsky after the “Prague Spring”. “At that time, there was a sense of living in a world, which we did indeed shape ourselves but which at the same time was shaped as a hostile environment”.

Following on from this, Židlický's photographs are concerned with the investigation of the existential essence of “being here”: When it comes to individual figures, “the pros and cons of their existence” are addressed, whereas, in the case of “human clusters”, what is at stake are “the roots of the solidarity of the crowd which often proves fictive in the end”. “Existence precedes essence”, Sartre once stated, and indeed, in our struggle of beating down uncertainty and of imposing our law on reality even momentarily, the body becomes the principal vehicle of expression of the disorientation and confusion which existence throws up. Single bodies fragmented, perforated and stained from the inside, or alternatively, groups of bodies against each other become bits and pieces of human experience fusing sexuality and concrete identity into time and space. An unexpected turn towards a continuous choreography of drama takes place. Here too, as in the Sartrean universe, this uneasy coexistence with the “other”—in terms of flesh accumulation—takes on particular relevance as a hostile sign of our reflective consciousness. An uneasiness regarding human nature resonates within these pictures in the face of an apparently meaningless and absurd world. Is there any way out of this existential nihilism, and if so, where?

Two parallel tempos, two parallel sets of forces, at the heart of which constitutes the original unmediated result of the “mechanical reproduction”: the vigour of the spirit behind the artwork versus its material realization, and movement on the surface versus movement beneath. Not surprisingly for Vladimír Židlický movement is everything. Nothing else matters, neither fixed narrative nor literal iconological references. The image is literally “melting” before our eyes. Time and space flow and bodies become diluted in motion generating a synesthesia effect that has parallels in dance and music. This is precisely the way Židlický would like us to perceive his works: as cosmic visualizations of musical scores transcribed onto light; scores which appeal to the viewer's straightforward perception distanced from any phenomenal observation. Should music, in Schopenhauer's words, represent the only art that does not copy ideas, should it embody the energy motor of this world in itself—“das Willen”—then Židlický's envisioning suggests a similar reading. Here in turn, it is artistic expression as an aesthetic proposition which assumes the role of the purest will. Photography is rendered a synecdoche in the struggle for the ever-elusive balance between the external world, art, and the body in its feminine–ultimately symbolic— dimension as the envelope of soul. With it the circle closes and nothingness gives place to light.

Text by Natasha Christia

All Pictures: Vladimír Židlický
www.zidlickyvladimir.eu


Published in Eyemazing, o2/2009

CZECH PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

Art and exhibition Hall at the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn
An interview with exhibition curator Vladimír Birgus


A comprehensive retrospective about the history of Czech photography in the 20th century will be on view at the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn until the 26th of July. Curated by photography professor Vladimír Birgus and by Jan Mlčoch, curator of the Photography Collection of the Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague, the show provides an exhaustive insight to 100 years of photographic creation by means of a gigantesque narrative that features a total of 197 artists—179 male and 18 female photographers.

The exhibition responds to the fundamental premise of “re-inscribing” the Czech production within the panorama of international photography while propagating its significance as one of the richest photographic legacies in Europe. And it does so by full right. For Czech photography remains to our days relatively unknown to the wider audience and underrated within the art market. There are, of course, specific names such as Frantisek Drtikol, Josef Sudek or Jan Saudek, who have attracted considerable international attention, but, in any case, they are regarded as exceptional cases, not in the least indicative of any broader fine art photography milieu, as if this latter had never existed.

On the periphery of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; on the periphery of the Paris and Berlin avant-gardes as a young democracy in the years between the two world wars; on the periphery of the world during the four decades of Communist protectionism: when it comes to the Bohemian Lands and their contribution to modern culture, all that seems to remain is the term “periphery”, mainly referring to a “second-class” quality. The existent photography theory has failed to unveil that, what lies behind the names of Drtikol, Sudek, Saudek, Koudelka, Funke and many others, is if not the richest certainly the most versatile, idiosyncratic and vibrant photographic tradition in Central and Eastern Europe —all this despite all the sufferings and shortcomings that have marked its historical fate.

From Pictorialism to Poetism and abstract photography, from social reportage to imaginative surreal photography and collage, from symbolist female portraits to the staged tableaux of nudes, Czech photography has always preserved at its core an alliance with experimentation, an autonomy of voice and above all, a tender relation with its apparatus, as if thinking, feeling and seeing “photographically” derived from its heart. Contrary to what one might expect from autodidactic photographers wandering in the Bohemian hills and family studios, capturing the quiet everyday life in remote provincial towns, Czech photography has never been a passive receptor of external influences, dictated eloquently by the world's avant-gardes. It has rather been a melting pot of inventiveness, reworking through the camera lens its material and ideological self-confinement into what constitutes the allegorical par excellence function of the photographic sign. One can tell that it is the Bohemian gaze behind the special aura the pictures of the Czech masters possess, and not any other. From the conventional portrait-studio to the most singular fine-art photographers, the elements in common are the lyricism of the gaze, the faith to the device, and a melancholic self-awareness.

As photographic writing proliferates, Czech photography emerges out of the shadow into the spotlight of attention, recompensing for the broken opportunities of the past. This exhibition offers the unique opportunity to recover photographers from oblivion, discover new talents, and above all pose new questions from a fresh perspective. Just a few days before the opening of the retrospective, Eyemazing had the opportunity of going through these issues with curator Vladimír Birgus. In the aftermath of this utterly stimulating conversation that follows below, it is left upon the show and its images to inspire…

Natasha Christia: 450 original prints and 197 photographers! Is this the first time such an extensive retrospective show on Czech photography takes place abroad or is it my impression?

Vladimír Birgus: Indeed, during the forty years of the Communist regime, little Czech photography appeared internationally. During the past two decades, however, a number of large exhibitions of Czech photography have been held in important galleries and museums, and at various festivals. Czech photography became the centre of attention particularly just before the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989. As early as 1990 Miroslav Vojtěchovský and I managed to organize the exhibition “Czechoslovak Photography of the Present”, which premiered in Cologne, before moving on to eight more European and two American cities. In the same year, Czech photography also predominated at the festivals in Arles and Houston. Still, the world’s interest in Central and Eastern European art was, with the exception of Russia, only short-lived, although various periods of Czech photography managed to get displayed at several exhibitions, the largest of them being “The Czech Photographic Avant-garde, 1918–1948”, held in Barcelona, Paris, Lausanne, Prague, and Munich. None of them, however, had yet taken in the whole twentieth century.

NC: How was the idea for this project then born? How did you eventually end up working together with Jan Mlčoch? What has either one of you contributed to the show?

VB: Mlčoch and I began to organise an exhibition on the history of Czech photography in Prague six years ago. When its three parts premiered simultaneously at three different exhibition halls in Prague in 2005, we presented about 1,300 photographs, including all the main trends and photographers from the Bohemian Lands between 1900 and 2000. We worked as a team in the organisation of the whole exhibition, going through many public and private collections and archives, and visiting dozens of photographers. We made the final selection together too—after many discussions of course—and wrote the articles for the panels and the exhibition guide. Now the exhibition is being shown again in the Art and Exhibition Hall of the German Federal Republic, Bonn. Even though the number of the exhibited photos has considerably been reduced, this is so far the largest foreign exhibition of Czech photography…

NC: The show is unquestionably impressively extensive… To my understanding, it attempts a chronological journey through various historical phases and movements of the Czech photography. Could you describe, in a few words, its highlights and the criteria you have applied at the moment of constructing its narrative?

VB: During the selection process we put the emphasis on works that are important in the international context. That’s why a great deal of space at the exhibition is devoted to the classics of modern Czech photography and the documentary photographs of Josef Koudelka, Jindřich Štreit, and Antonín Kratochvíl. We wanted, however, to also show some chapters of the history of photography in the Bohemian Lands, which had received little attention till now. Among them, for instance, is the work of German photographers from the Bohemian Lands. Did you know that more than three million Germans lived in Czechoslovakia between the two world wars, either born or sought asylum there from Hitler’s regime? It was during his five years in Czechoslovakia, for example, that John Heartfield made his most important political photomontages and worked for a number of Czech periodicals and publishing houses. Another chapter is the fabricated propagandistic photographs in the style of Socialist Realism from the worst years of the Communist regime in the early 1950s.

NC: Czech photography is then much more heterogeneous than expected! It is striking though that any reference to this diversity is still absent from photo-books related with the Czech legacy. What I mean here is that when referring to the 20th century avant-gardes, most books place Prague and Czech photography on the periphery of the artistic metropolises of Paris and Berlin, while also excluding them from the post-war context. Still, the argument of this show seems to revolve around the idea that the Czech photography’s influence on German and American photography has been profound. What does this position imply: A new writing of history?

VB: Not at all! This would be a misunderstanding of our claims. In no case do we mean to suggest here that the works of the Czech Avant-garde photographers Jaroslav Rössler, Jaromír Funke, or Václav Zykmund had a decisive impact on German or American photography. What my colleagues and I wish to show instead is that in many cases Czech photographers did not merely copy French, German, or Russian models, but were amongst those involved in the forward-looking trends on a worldwide scale. Take, for instance, Jaroslav Rössler. He was making abstract and Constructivist photographs as early as 1923, at a time when, for example, Rodchenko was not even taking photographs yet. Or Zykmund, who was making art nudes as early as the second half of the 1930s, anticipating many of the elements of later happenings, performance and body art. The fact that we do not find their works—or even the works of František Drtikol and Josef Sudek—mentioned in earlier American or west European histories of photography is mainly due to the isolation of Czechoslovakia during the forty years of the Communist regime. During that time it was forgotten that Prague was not on the periphery of the arts but a centre of Cubism and Surrealism.

NC: With more or less 200 participating photographers, should we then expect this exhibition to provide the opportunity of discovering old and new names, and if so, can you give us a short account of interesting cases?

VB: We would be delighted if the exhibition and the 360-page German catalogue, which will later be published in English as well, helped towards that! Simply the fact that the Art and Exhibition Hall of the German Federal Republic, Bonn, one of the most attended institutions of its kind in Europe, included our exhibition in its program together with a Modigliani retrospective or exhibitions of modern art masters from the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, is a great success! As far as old and new discoveries are concerned, it is significant that whereas the Czech Avant-garde and, partly, contemporary photography are gradually managing to make their way onto the international scene, Czech documentary photography of the 1940s or 1960s remains almost unknown.

NC: Even so, it has become more than evident that photography is deeply rooted in the Bohemian Lands. What is the cause for it? Why does any analogous tradition not exist, for example, in neighbouring countries such as Poland or Hungary?

VB: Well, to be fair, Hungary can boast a number of important photographers, who achieved fame in exile —like André Kertész, Martin Munkácsi, Brassaï, and Robert Capa. Little is known today about the other excellent photographers who remained in their native land. That’s mainly because there are few books about Hungarian photography in English, German, or French. On the other hand, with the exception of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Poland had no important photographers in the 1920s and 1930s, yet a number of high-quality photomontages were made there. Fortunately, the world is discovering them —though, very slowly.

NC: Judging from the title of the show, “Czech photography in the 20th century”, you have chosen to expand your research chronologically until 2000. Why is the 19th century excluded?

VB: From the beginning of the project, we counted on it comprising works from the 20th century only. The fact that Czech photography in the 19th century had no photographers on a par with Nadar or Cameron also played a role. The first Czech photographer of international importance was Drtikol. Still, to consider all the important trends of a hundred years is quite enough.

NC: Coming to the present, how would you describe the generation of contemporary Czech photographers? What links them with the past? How do they position themselves within the international photography arena?

VB: Contemporary Czech photography does not have any one dominant trend. Rather, it comprises a number of coexisting trends ranging from a distinctly subjective conception of the new documentary photography to the inventive use of digital manipulation. Photography has left its ghetto to become an important part of the visual arts. An increasing number of artists are devoting themselves to it, and it is now part of many important institutions. Whereas during the Communist regime Czech photographers worked in definite isolation, today’s young photographers are reacting quickly to current trends of the international art scene. Fortunately, many of them have their own styles and a good deal of imagination. It remains hard for them, however, to break into the international scene. In the Czech Republic the institutional support for photography is far less than, say, in the Netherlands, France, or Germany. Also art from the post-Communist countries of central Europe is not exactly at the centre of international interest right now, which is evident, for example, from the programs of the Mois de la Photo, Paris, and the Rencontres d’Arles, where it appears as if Czech photography had no one but Koudelka. Recently, however, some young Czech photographers have enjoyed considerable success, like Dita Pepe and also Tereza Vlčková, who won this year’s Prix BMW at the “Lyon Septembre de la photographie”. Last year, Jitka Hanzlová, a Czech photographer living in Germany, won the 2007 BMW Paris Photo Prize.

NC: How strong is the presence of photography in the Czech society in general? Is it still easy today to encounter small “photographic treasures” in flea markets?

VB: Photography has a far stronger position in Czech art today than it ever had. Courses are offered at six universities and art schools. But many institutions —including the National Gallery in Prague—, which do not have a specialized collection of photography, still continue to underestimate photography. On the other hand, I regret to inform you that the chance of finding a rare Drtikol or Sudek photograph at a flea market today is quite small! They long ago ended up in various museums or private collections, and when they do show up for auction in Prague, they are sometimes more expensive than in New York!

NC: Yes, but apart from the Drtikols and the Sudeks, many exceptionally wonderful vintage prints from the fifties and sixties are still auctioned in very accessible prices! Being on the front line of the promotion of Czech photography since the early nineties, you must have seen many changes taking place before your eyes, mainly as far as its inception by collectors and the market is concerned. What have the greatest achievements been and what is left to do according to your point of view?

VB: Czech photography is enjoying incomparably greater renown today than two decades ago. That is evinced not only in its being part of the collections of leading museums, but also in the prices it fetches on the market. You are right! While some of Drtikol's nudes or Sudek's still lifes are now being sold for tens of thousands of euros or dollars (one small Drtikol nude recently fetched more than $300,000 at Sotheby’s, New York), vintage prints by many good but still internationally unknown Czech photographers from the 1950s and 1960s can still be obtained for a couple of hundred euros! And histories of world photography that fail to mention even Sudek are still being published! Czech photography still has a long way to go before it achieves full international recognition.



Text by Natasha Christia

Czech Photography in the 20th Century

Exhibition through July 26
Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn
Curators: Dr. phil. Vladimír Birgus and Jan Mlčoch

Published in Eyemazing 02/2009