Vintage and Contemporary Czech Photography SK Josefsberg Studio Portland.

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 not at home among the modernist countries of Europe; it was occupied by the agency of the Germans from 1939 to 1945 from the Soviets after World War II and rul on a Communist regime from 1948 to 1989 completely through these periods of political turmoil, its modernist tradition, equal its avant-garde, survived. This was partly because, prior to these decades of vicissitudes, the early late traditions were well established. level in the era of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire, Bohemia was a highly industrialized area and a hotbed of political activity. according to the late nineteenth century, art photography was already ensconc and through 1918, when Czechoslovakia was established as an independent home it had an active photography sight Thus the photographer Jaromir Funke (1896-1945) was apart of the international avant-garde of the 1920 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 pair tandem exhibitions in Portland and Seattle. Together these exhibit tos offered :a selected overview of twentieth-century Czech photography. The exhibition in Portland was curated at Pavel Banka, the one in Seattle on Eva Kralova director of the Prague House of Photography. Contemporary artists were shown at the one and the other exhibitions and the plan is to have an exhibition in Prague nearest year with Northwestern photographers. [1]

In Portland, the exhibition featured familiar vintage, photographs: like as those by Frantisek Drtikol (1883-1961) from the late 1920 Drtikol pos in a state of nature women near geometric shapes, as in the offbeat constructivist composition unclothed with Crossed Poles (1929). Influenced through 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 nearest generation, Josef Sudek (1896-1976), was describeed by a few of his characteristic works of the 1950 and 60 as well as a portfolio of photographs of Saint stay Cathedral commissioned in 1928 forward 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, yet he lost an arm in World War I and was unable to seek his original, profession. Funke became a finish friend in the 1920s, on the same level as Sudek began to experiment with the pictorialist manipulations popular with the strange York Stieglitz circle, Pictorialism was popular in Czechoslovakia and Sudek's Saint stay Cathedral photographs demonstrate his expertise with these techniques. by the agency of the early 1930s though, Sudek joined modernism and specifically what was called "New Wave" photography. unless 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 redundants with the Socialist Realism of those years, yet his continued production of poetic new works such as the photographs in the SK Josefburg Studio exhibition, demonstrates that Socialist Realism was not the no other than possibility in Czechoslovakia during the Communist era

Another photographer of this same generation, with a self-same 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 snappish atmospheric image that suggests these beasts of Notre Dame were dreamy prodigys rather than threatening guards. Kriz went to Berkeley in 1952 quit photography until the late '60 and' then make go rounded to creating and photographing intriguing Surrealist compositions in his backyard. [2]

Photographers showed 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 clump Kolar's work in the Seattle exhibition belongs to a genre that could be called humanitarian documentary, a powerful tradition in the nation rooted in the 1930s. Kolar's drawn out series of works devoted to the town of Ostrava spans from the mid '60 to the at hand 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 responded to Ostrava and worked in the coal mines, at the same time that he photographed them. In the "Ostrava Series," stark white sheets hang forward a clothesline in the foreground, while a slagheap be hots in the background. A man reaches revealed to feed a swan according to a dreary pond, childish young trick riders stand three high in succession a horse. In the midst of this desolate environment, tribe manage to continue, even to find a way to derive pleasure from life. Kolar won the Mother Jone International Photography Award in 1991 for this series, providing funding for continuing work upon the project.