fotograf zone FESTIVAL 2025

#1 min Pavel Vančát

Francesca Woodman. The Artist's Books. London: MACK, 2023

#1 min Tomáš Pospěch

Jitka Hlaváčková (ed.). Věštění z noční oblohy částečně zakryté mraky. Role fotografie v postmediální době, Prague: GHMP 2022

#8 min Modry Duch, Zdena Kolečková

Photography and the tourist set out almost simultaneously on a journey through history on the threshold of modernity. They walk together and transform each other through mutual interactions. I follow these changes from the perspective of the tourist gaze, asking myself where the tourist’s gaze is directed from and what it is directed at. I search for answers in the story of a single daguerreotype of the Niagara Falls, captured in 1840 by Hugh Lee Pattinson.

#4 min Josef Moucha

“People must fight against the evil they feel equal to at that moment,” said the dying Jan Palach. He awakened the conscience of his fellow citizens in January 1969 – by self-immolation. Markéta Luskačová's photographs show the funeral procession through the centre of Prague as a demonstration of resistance to the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia.

#4 min Michał Szalast

For over twenty years, Krzysztof Gołuch has been focusing on the lives of people with disabilities. The length of the period is a guarantee that this is not a cold account of an outside observer. We can be sure that it is not about stupefying scenes of suffering that quickly and easily attract attention or an attempt to impress with pictorial virtuosity.

#3 min Kateryna Radchenko

Alexander Chekmenev is a documentary photographer of his time. Early on in his career, he captured the turbulent transformations of the 1990s in his home region of Luhansk. Later he moved to Kyiv where he continued to document the events in his country and the lives of his fellow citizens. His camera has always been focused on a person in a stream of historical events that influence their story.

#5 min Martin Mazanec

On February 1, 1929, the Film Guild Cinema opened at 52 W. 8th St. in Greenwich Village, New York City. In the promotion materials, invitation and short press releases published on the occasion of its inauguration, it was billed as The First 100% Cinema in the United States. The exterior of the plain dark two-storey building with a raised ground floor was structured merely by windows and plastic geometric phasing. The latter was achieved by means of light prisms which formed the decorative construction of the facade. The opening of the cinema was attended by New York’s artistic and social elite of the period, including film director David W. Griffith, writer Theodore Dreiser and composer George Gershwin. With its hall seating 500 spectators, which was rather small for period conditions, the new building was commissioned by the Film Arts Guild. The Guild specialized in importing art films and experimental films from abroad, presenting them through American distribution. The investment in the new space was not linked to the vision of the transformation of the cinematographic system but rather to the increase of the number of cinemas in the city’s downtown and to the promotion of European modernism.

#6 min Zdena Kolečková

The work of German photographer Candida Höfer divides, in an interesting way, the art and art theoretical scenes. Whereas a majority of the specialized public enthusiastically accepts the monumental and, in a positive sense of the word, elitist character of her photographic oeuvre, it strikes the others as spectacular and coldly decadent. The applied model of emptied space, qua environment made via human activity in which the human body is absent, becomes proof for critics of a contrivance and schematization on a thematic level. The artist, convinced that what she is doing is right, however does not pander to public taste. She works with principles preconditioned by imagination, an audience’s personal experience and a respect for non-material values. Candida Höfer’s creative position was also shaped via her positive relationship to the early modern period, especially to the canons of Renaissance-style representation and to architecture, which she perceives as the communicational intermediary between today and epochs long since passed. 

#3 min Dušan Zahoranský

Viktor Takáč is a rigorous analyst of the moving image. His video-films are based on randomly found places and bizarre situations, or, rather, the subjects of these are precisely planned and subsequently composed of the photographs or footage he takes. Takáč painstakingly analyzes the material he captures and then meticulously – frame by frame – assembles this into his screening neo-plasms. Akin to a detective on a quest for the primal cause of a turning point, he notes seemingly minor details such as stationary objects or beings, whose actions are at odds with the composition of the shot, whether for an extremely long or short interval of time.