23.10.2024 - 20.12.2024
Fait Gallery, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno
Curator: Denisa Kujelová
Opening: 23rd October, 7 pm
The artists of the collective exhibition The Other Side of a Photograph share unusual visuality, the consistency of light and the concept of individual photographs that challenge conventions. Selected works by the tandem of Lukáš Jasanský and Martin Polák, Michal Kalhous, Alena Kotzmannová, Marie Kratochvílová and Markéta Othová, in dialogue with Jan Svoboda's personal approach to photography and Jiří Kovanda's subtle interventions, allow us to glimpse, through their shared sensitivity, the hidden reality of the world in unexpected detail.
The selection of analogue, mostly black-and-white photographs seemingly captures what almost all of us see. In many cases, banal and sometimes even unphotogenic situations, often emphasised in a deliberately unprofessional manner to the point of amateur photography, are sometimes embarrassing. However, the mundane in them opens up wide boundaries of beauty that we probably would not have thought of without their help. Susan Sontag descrines it in the chapter The Heroism of Vision: “No one has ever found ugliness through photography. But many have discovered beauty in this way. Except when the camera is used for documentation or as part of a social ritual, what makes people take photographs is a desire to find something beautiful..."[1]
All of the artists, like Jan Svoboda (1934-1990) from the late 1960s, have in various ways transcended the established principles and canons of photography and in their distinctive approach deliberately questioned its supposed message and formal perfection, expanding it with new possibilities of treatment and perception. "The things I do show no artistry. And I want them not to. I want them not to be pretty, to be as ordinary as possible, not to dazzle, not to shock, not to surprise...”[2] Just like Svoboda's work, the works of the mentioned artists have never aspired to conform to standard photographic practices, and like him, some of them have also expressed their opposition to the very term photographer. The theorists Pavel Vančát and Jan Freiberg introduced for their broader thinking and grasp of the medium the fitting tem of "nonphotography"[3] referencing the term anti- or non-photography coined by Nancy Foote in 1976 in relation to postmodern photography.[4]
What makes their photographs so similar is their sophisticated work with technical imperfection, the peculiar tonality of the narrow grey scale and often the use of large formats in sharp contrast to the intimacy and apparent banality of the chosen subjects. Like Svoboda, they focus on their immediate surroundings such as the environment of their homes and the ordinary objects with which we share our private space. In a photograph constructed as an autonomous surface, the role of light in its reflection and absorption is essential, and so is the relationship between objects and their background, with its demarcation often so subtle that the two planes almost merge. This is of course enhanced by the narrow tonality of grey in the choice of black-and-white photography: "Since black-and-white configurations are theoretical, they cannot really exist in the world. But black-and-white photographs do exist. They are in fact the images of the conceptions of the theory of optics, which means that they arose from this theory. [...] Therein lies their strange beauty, identical to the beauty of the conceptual universe. This is why many photographers prefer black-and-white photographs as they reveal more clearly the true meaning of photography, i.e. the world of conceptios."[5]
In regard to the legacy of Jan Svoboda and his exceptional sensitivity, the exhibition shows selected photographs from the broader oeuvres of the individual artists in which forms and procedures more or less referring to Svoboda's work can be recognized. Due to the very narrow theme scope of the exhibition concept, images from various cycles and in some cases diptychs have been selected in collaboration with the artists, and it should be noted that their meaning, which was established in the original context through the composition of their units, has been altered for this specific event.
[1] SONTAG, Susan. O fotografii. Brno, Praha a Litomyšl: Barrister & Principal a Paseka, p. 80.
[2] OTHOVÁ, Markéta; CÍSAŘ, Karel; JANÍČKOVÁ, Adéla, a NOVOTNÝ, Michal. Markéta Othová: již brzy. V Praze: Národní galerie, 2022, p. 7.
[3] VANČÁT, Pavel, a FREIBERG, Jan (eds.). Fotografie?? / Photography?? (exh. cat.). Klatovy: Galerie Klatovy / Klenová, 2004.
[4] FOOTE, Nancy. The Anti-Photographers. Artforum, September 1976, year 15, no. 1., pp. 46–54. Also here:
Douglas FOGLE (ed.). The Last Picture Show. Artists Using Photography, 1960–1982 (exh. cat.). Minneapolis: Walker Art Center 2003, pp. 24–31.
[5] FLUSSER, Vilém. Za filosofii fotografie. Prague: Fra, 2013, pp. 48–49.
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Fait Gallery MEM
Božetěchova Street 1 (entrance from Metodějova Street), Brno
02/11 – 1/12/2012
Opening: 1/11/2012 at 7pm
Curator: Jiří Ptáček
Tomáš Svoboda chose one second of the film with the American actress Julia Roberts and spread it to 25 separate images. He proceeded from the most common frame frequency used in film and television and he dissected the transient moment of one second, which is so short to which under normal circumstances nobody pays the slightest attention, into basic visual elements, as if it was possible to see two adjacent layers of the actress’s existence – Julie Roberts in the role of the second Julia Roberts “per se“.
Tomáš Svoboda belongs to an informal circle of artists using methods and means of expression of other disciplines. He oscillates between literature, stage design and film and combines them the most consistently in gallery installations focused on alternative forms of narration. He always maintains economy of means of expression and the model quality; he often works with curt, descriptive texts and their simple composition. The installation is completed with fragments of three-dimensional set pieces or architectural structures that refer to ephemeral structures in film and television studios.
Also in the spatial installation called Jedna vteřina života Julie Roberts / One second in the life of Julia Roberts we can find a number of the above-mentioned elements. Instead of narration, however, the main attention is focused on the specific existential duplication of an actor. Despite the performed anatomical study, the “fiction“ and the “non-fiction“ remain inseparable substances. Experiment – if it ever was an experiment – failed. To a scientist, such findings could cause a significant damage to his confidence and undermine his mental balance. To the contrary, for an artist, it could mean a poetic potential. Emptied space is filled with experience of different perception of an image which were flowing and now don’t flow anymore, a story which is necessary to put together piece by piece as a puzzle from each image and the time that began to expand, despite its original insipidity.
Jiří Ptáček