CZECH CONNECTIONS.

Vintage and Contemporary Czech Photography

SK Josefsberg Studio

Portland, Oregon

March 1-April 7, 2001

Contemporary Photography in the Czech Republic 

Benham Studio Gallery

Seattle, Washington 

March 19-April 28, 2001

Czechoslovakia stands out among the modernist countries of Europe; it was occupied by the Germans from 1939 to 1945, by the Soviets after World War II and ruled by a Communist regime from 1948 to 1989. Throughout these periods of political turmoil, its modernist tradition, even its avant-garde, survived. This was partly because, prior to these decades of vicissitudes, the early modern traditions were well established. Even in the era of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire, Bohemia was a highly industrialized area and a hotbed of political activity. By the late nineteenth century, art photography was already ensconced and by 1918, when Czechoslovakia was established as an independent country, it had an active photography scene. Thus the photographer Jaromir Funke (1896-1945) was apart of the international avant-garde of the 1920s with his cameraless images and abstract compositions alongside artists like El Lissitsky, Man Ray and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and his wife, Lucia Moholy, who was also Czech.

Funke's Children Ascending a Stairway(c. 1922), marks the oldest photograph in the two tandem exhibitions in Portland and Seattle. Together these shows offered :a selected overview of twentieth-century Czech photography. The exhibition in Portland was curated by Pavel Banka, the one in Seattle by Eva Kralova director of the Prague House of Photography. Contemporary artists were shown at both exhibitions and the plan is to have an exhibition in Prague next year with Northwestern photographers. [1]

In Portland, the exhibition featured familiar vintage, photographs: such as those by Frantisek Drtikol (1883-1961) from the late 1920s Drtikol posed nude women near geometric shapes, as in the offbeat constructivist composition Nude with Crossed Poles (1929). Influenced by the modernism of Funke, Drtikol was also known for his portraits of writers and artists. He had a short career, giving up photography for painting in 1935.

In the Portland exhibition, the outstanding photographer of the next generation, Josef Sudek (1896-1976), was represented by a few of his characteristic works of the 1950s and 60s, as well as a portfolio of photographs of Saint Guy Cathedral commissioned in 1928 on the tenth anniversary of the Republic of Czechoslovakia. This album of pictorialist works emphasizes the grandeur and romanticism of the cathedral.

Sudek was trained as a bookbinder, but he lost an arm in World War I and was unable to pursue his original, profession. Funke became a close friend in the 1920s, even as Sudek began to experiment with the pictorialist manipulations popular with the New York Stieglitz circle, Pictorialism was popular in Czechoslovakia and Sudek's Saint Guy Cathedral photographs demonstrate his expertise with these techniques. By the early 1930s though, Sudek joined modernism and specifically what was called "New Wave" photography. But he continued to use large plate cameras in spite of his disability, and in 1958 he used an 1894 panoramic camera to make a series of images of Prague that emphasized a poetic, almost dreamy, view of the city. He was completely at odds with the Socialist Realism of those years, but his continued production of poetic modern works such as the photographs in the SK Josefburg Studio exhibition, demonstrates that Socialist Realism was not the only possibility in Czechoslovakia during the Communist era .

Another photographer of this same generation, with a very different biography is Vilem Kriz (1921-94). Kriz, who studied with Funke, was a surrealist photographer in Czechoslovakia until 1946 when he went to Paris and achieved recognition for his images of the dreary post-occupation city. Notre Dame Gargoyles (1948) is a moody, atmospheric image that suggests these beasts of Notre Dame were dreamy monsters rather than threatening guards. Kriz went to Berkeley in 1952, quit photography until the late '60s and' then turned to creating and photographing intriguing Surrealist compositions in his backyard. [2]

Photographers represented who were born during and just after World War II include Banka: (b. 1941), Jaroslav Benes (b. 1946) Stepan Grygar (b. 1955), Viktor Kolar (b. 1941), Miroslav Machotka (b. 1946) and Joseph Moucha (b. 1956). Of this group, Kolar's work in the Seattle exhibition belongs to a genre that could be called humanitarian documentary, a powerful tradition in the country, rooted in the 1930s. Kolar's long series of works devoted to the town of Ostrava spans from the mid '60s to the present. He was born in Ostrava, an industrial city six hours east of Prague, and grew up in the midst of its coal mines in a family of six children. [3] In 1973, after returning from five years of exile in Canada, he returned to Ostrava and worked in the coal mines, at the same time that he photographed them. In the "Ostrava Series," stark white sheets hang on a clothesline in the foreground, while a slagheap glows in the background. A man reaches out to feed a swan by a dreary pond, childish young trick riders stand three high on a horse. In the midst of this desolate environment, people manage to continue, even to find a way to enjoy life. Kolar won the Mother Jones International Photography Award in 1991 for this series, providing funding for continuing work on the project.

Closely related to Kolar, but more toward the communicative side of image-making, is Ibra Ibrahamovic who is documenting towns in Northern Bohemia that are now wastelands. In the city of Most, for example, 60,000 people were displaced by high-rise buildings; the 800-year-old town was torn down in the 1960s to enable the mining of coal. Today it is abandoned and full of toxic waste. The series of photographs called "Libkovice, The Conscience of the North" (1992-93) is represented in the Benham Studio Gallery exhibition by Karl Krejci in his House and Karl Krejci Going for Coal. In the first, Krejci sits in his impoverished home, with his few pieces of clothing, clearly in despair. He expressed the sad mood of this village ruined by industrial development. Landscape behind chemical factory fish kill, Zaluzi (1993) is set up like a traditional, picturesque landscape, with trees framing the picture and a foreground, middle ground and background. The foreground is dead fish, the middle ground is dead trees and th e background is a chemical plant. The classical beauty of the light and dark relationships of the image highlights the devastation of industrial pollution, but that classicism also distances emotions. It is as though the photographer is holding his breath in order to survive so much desolation.

Another aspect of recent Czech photography is staged photographs, many of them affiliated with Surrealism, others with Symbolism and Romanticism. Banka creates drawings with light in his well-known earlier portraits of women with geometric forms that seem directly in the line of descent from Drtikol. The highlight of the Benham Studio Gallery exhibition, though, was a recent series of landscapes completed by Banka on the coast of Oregon during an extended stay in 1997. Banka set up his camera at night and left it for two hours. The result is a series of eerie, blurry images of forests and sea that suggest ghostly presences and a mysterious, although not terrifying enveloping nature. We cannot quite penetrate these forests, but we feel that they are occupied. Sometimes the work becomes entirely abstract, at other times more readable as a straightforward seascape, but these works suggest a non-rational reality that emerges only if we spend time with them. There was a partnership between the ghost-like images in the Oregon photographs and Banka's 1998 series "Terezin," exploring the 200-year-old fort near Prague that the Nazis converted into a concentration camp. The empty chambers of the fort still contain showers and bunks that resonate with the suffering of those who died there. Banka's low-contrast black and white images are dirges to the spirits of the people who died there, even as we can sense that he believes that those spirits are now wandering free, perhaps in some Oregon forest.

Other photographers in these two exhibitions who work with staged effects, but in very different ways, include Vaclav Jirasek (b. 1965), Ivan Pinkava (b. 1961) and Michaela Brachtlova (b. 1970). Jirasek is part of the so-called "Brotherhood," a group of photographers prominent since 1989. They work with "old master" techniques, but the work is formal and decorative. Most characteristic of his style is Untitled, no. 3 (1999), an image of dense shrubbery with a foreground of falling petals printed on lush, selenium-toned reddish paper. The artist is obviously taking advantage of the high silver content of Czech photography paper (its richer tones are impossible to produce using printing papers manufactured in the United States, but, ironically, the trade-off for deeper tones is the pollution that production of Czech paper creates.)

Pinkava works with traditional studio lighting and subjects, but these figures seem to be the outcasts of the mythological traditions and classical paintings to which they refer. In Salome (1996), the seductive temptress is now a thin and somber young woman wrapped in a heavy coat. She cradles the, skull against her as though it is a dead lover. The work is part of a long series titled "The Theater of Lost Souls." [4] The isolation of the figures in empty space, the focus on physical body that fills the foreground, the classicism of the studio lighting, all suggest that the photographer was familiar with Robert Mapplethorpe but the sensuality is absent. These characters are not here and now but in the past. His First Wine (1995) invokes Caravaggio in its subject matter and pose, but again there is no eroticism. The alienation and even static desolation of Pinkava's cast of characters descends directly from Fyodor Dostoevesky and Antonin Artaud.

Brachtlova's isolated studio compositions go one step further beyond reality with their odd organic appendages, seemingly made of wax. They are disturbingly phallic, erotic and incomprehensible. We can gradually accept these fragments of the figure as abstractions, once we move past the eeriness. Alena Katzmonnova used liquid light on canvas in her "Station to Station" series (n.d.) which also suggests displaced scenes and people. Marketa Bankova's images are claustrophobic. In TV Evening (1998) trapped faces look out between the concrete floors of the impersonal modern urban structure; they suggest a psychological as well as a physical entrapment.

Regardless of whether their affiliations were modernist, surrealist, pictorialist, symbolist or documentary, these photographers had clear spiritual affinities. These photographers shared a serious mood. There is no exuberance or shouts of joy in any of these photographs. Their images all address the fragility of life, and of individuals, whether artists or average citizens, caught up in systems and powers beyond their control. Such seriousness is a natural result of the complex history of oppressions in twentieth-century Czechoslovakia, as well as the difficult economic transitions it has been experiencing since the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and the division of the country into the Czech and Slovak Republics. There was one exception to the pervasive somberness that was not part of either of the exhibitions, but it could be called an appendage and, hopefully, it points to the spirit of the future for Czech photography. Bankova's quriky, humorous multi-media Web site called "New York City Map" (www.bankova.cz ) feels like a high energy celebration after an exhausting confinement. Her photographs of New York from Soho to Times Square, on the subway and on the street, all accompanied by sounds and short stories, capture her fresh responses to the city. But, in the background a lyrical soundtrack recalls the meditative, poetic mood of the photographers of the Czech Republic and their powerful instinct for survival in the midst of so many difficulties.

SUSAN PLATT is a freelance art critic and art historian based in Seattle and Istanbul. She is a contributing editor for Artpapers magazine.

NOTES

(1.) The Prague House of Photography is a non-profit art organization dedicated to photography in the Czech Republic Founded in 1990, it includes a membership of 40 photographers, art historians and art critics. Programming included exhibitions, domestic and international projects and an educational program.

(2.) On Vilem Kriz. see Rod Slemmons, Vi)em Kriz Photographs (Portland, OR: SK Josefsburg Gallery, 2000).

(3.) See Andrea Bodrogi, "Interview with Viktor Kolar, Prague 1995," on www.nearbycafe.com/php.

(4.) "Ivan Pinkava, Theatre of Lost Souls," at Mesaros Galleries, West Virginia university, Morgantown, WV, February 6-17, 2000.