Bøger af Vladimir Birgus

Catalog of an exhibition held at Galerie hlavniho m'esta Prahy, M'estska knihovna, Praha, May 15-August 18, 2013; Mesiac fotografie, Dom umenia, Bratislava, November 5-December 1, 2013; and Muzeum um'eni Olomouc, May 15-September 14, 2014.

It was not so long ago that one would have been hard pressed to find a single Czech name in most western European or American books on the history of photography. Today, things are very different: photographers like Josef Sudek, Frantisek Drtikol, Jaromír Funke, Josef Koudelka, Jan Saudek and Antonín Kratochvíl enjoy international acclaim, and as Czechoslovakia emerged from over half-century of totalitarian rule, the rest of the world was astounded to discover that such a small nation could boast so many talented and original photographers. Nonetheless, entire chapters of the history of Czech photography remain largely neglected. Czech Photography of the 20th Century is the first volume to survey the main trends, figures and masterpieces of Czech photography from the beginning to the end of the last century. Its 517 plates include not only the most historically important photographs and photomontages, but also works that have lain buried in archives and rare books, or photographs published for the first time.

The oeuvre of the leading Czech avant-garde photographer Eugen Wiskovsky (1888-1964) is not large in size or subject range, but it is noteworthy in its originality, depth of ideas, and mastery. Wiskovsky's early New Objectivist works, from the late 1920s and early 1930s, sought artistic effect in apparently nonaesthetic objects: His inventive lighting and cropping allowed their elementary lines to stand out, to lose their worldly associations and take on potential metaphorical meanings. In his dynamic diagonal compositions, Wiskovsky was among the most radical practitioners of Czech Constructivism. His landscape work is similarly distinctive. With text from Vladimmr Birgus, a historian of photography and the head of the Institute of Creative Photography at Silesian University, Opava, in the Czech Republic.