Evžen Sobek

Born on the 4th June 1967 in Brno. Graduated from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Technology in Brno and the Institute of Creative Photography of the Silesian University in Opava. He works as a freelance photographer and as a photography teacher at the Institute of Creative Photoghraphy, Silesian University, Opava and at the  Fotoškola Brno. He also works as a curator of Galerie Artistù in Brno.
The focal point of his work is documentary photography.

Evžen Sobek, a graduate of the Institute of Creative Photography, Opava, began to develop his personal style as early as in his preparatory work for the project People of the Hluèín Region and, later, in his own project Roma in the City of Brno.
He is one of the few photographers who have managed to avoid the trend of romanticizing the Roma. Some photographs of this cycle became part of his later collection Ecce Homo, which brought Sobek his renown. In 2000 Sobek received First Prize in the international Mio Photo Award competition in Japan. The collection has now been expanded with pictures from his travels to Portugal, Spain, France, Japan, Jordan, and Israel. Sobek’s photographs are remarkable for their precise, simple composition, as well as their high quality of picture. Their subject matter is tied to the title of the cycle (Ecce Homo), raising questions regarding human identity.
In 2001 Sobek achieved second place in the Talentinum competition held at the Czech Centre of Photography, Prague. In 2000–01 he was Curator of the Foma Gallery, Brno, and in 2002 he began to lecture at the Institute of Creative Photography, Opava. Photographs from the Ecce Homo cycle have been exhibited at many solo and group shows in the Czech Republic and abroad.

Many of the photographs in Sobek’s series Ecce Homo leave one with the impression that they are carefully staged, sophisticatedly composed film shots. Everything in them is in its place, nothing is superfluous, nothing distracts us from the chief motifs, which, in confrontation with each other, create a phantasmic atmosphere. A monkey tries in vain to escape the space demarcated by the short strap that binds it; a long wall with cracking plaster, a metal monstrosity, and a bit of parched earth.  In similarly dismal scenery, by a  dilapidated shack on arid packed earth sits a young girl holding a letter or a book, watching an aeroplane taking off, a symbol of change, escape, and hope. In the midst of some empty wet area with a large cross in the background, a barefoot man in camouflage, with running shoes on his hands, is down on all fours, bowing his head to a dog that touches his shoulders with its front paws as if blessing or hugging him. One of three men on the stern of a ship, which is heading away from shore, reaches out to a man on the other side of a railing, but we don’t know what is happening here. Has this person, of whom only the head and extended arm are visible, fallen overboard? And is the man whose head we don’t see trying to save him? Or is this an attempted suicide? Or a game?  Or does the ship simply have two decks of different heights?
    We won’t get any certain answers, because Sobek likes to have some mystery and ambiguity in his latest photographs, and tends to raise various questions rather than provide clear answers. But although his highly polished compositions lead one to suspect they’ve been staged, they are in fact originally perceived and originally captured fragments of unmanipulated reality. It is a reality full of latent visual metaphors, signs, and symbols, which, to an open-minded person looking at them, can say much about not only the world, people, and their relations, but also the photographer’s feelings, opinions, and experiences; photography, for Sobek, is also a means of communication and self-reflection.
    Sobek, however, came gradually to the “subjective documentary”, a kind of photography that is highly popular today (and also, regrettably, increasingly watered down in the work of less talented photographers). He began to take photographs relatively late, at the age of twenty four, devoting himself chiefly to various kinds of experimental work, including photograms, drawing with developer and fixative, collage, and fiddling with the negative and the print in various ways, making use of his own considerable talent as an artist. A mere two years after acquiring his first camera and taking some mature photographs, he was accepted to the Institute of Creative Photography, at Silesian University, Opava.
    Initially, his chief interest there was socially oriented documentary photography of a humanist orientation. To a large extent this was probably due to his intensive contact with Jindøich Štreit, one of the most important representatives of Czech documentary photography. Štreit often leads his students to take documentary photographs of clearly defined  topics, that is, photographs about the lives of a specific group of people, in which the depiction of some typical way of life is permeated with a generalizing view of fundamental life values. In this spirit, Sobek made a strong set of photographs about the Premonstratensian monks of the monastery at Želiv and a number of photos from the large project entitled People of the Hluèín Region in the  1990s; together with photographs by Tomáš Pospìch and Martin Popeláø, they remain among the best works of the Hluèín region ever made by students of the Institute of Creative Photography. In both cases, Sobek gained the trust of the people he wanted to photograph, and entered their private lives, often taking photographs whose directness gives one the impression that the people in front of the lens haven’t noticed the photographer at all.
    The Hluèín region, however, is also where Sobek made his first photographs with strikingly unusual compositions that contrast people  and milieus, with motifs in various spatial planes or several events occurring in parallel, in which he has sought levels of meaning deeper than those on the surface. Subjective views of this kind occur even more in his subsequent cycle, Roma in the City of Brno, even though it too continued to be dominated by a more traditional conception of the social documentary. In this cycle, which he expanded in 1999 with photographs from the Roma quarter of the town of Prostìjov, Sobek tried to achieve the most complex view, considerably removed both from the romantic shots of gypsy settlements in Slovakia by Josef Koudelka and his followers, and from the naturalistic shots of the wretched living conditions of the people on the Chánov housing estate at the town of Most and in Matièní ulice, a street in Ústí nad Labem. Apart from raw photographs of Roma on the edge of society and slightly exotic photographs of Roma weddings and funerals, the cycle includes photographs of successful Roma businessmen, Roma homosexuals, and the everyday lives of middle-class Roma families, of people whose skin colour is the only thing that visually distinguishes them from most of their fellow citizens.
    After his work on the Roma cycle, Sobek, in 2000, moved even further away from clearly defined topics in clearly defined milieus towards a freer conception of subjective documentary photography. In the subsequent, still unfinished set Ecce Homo it is no longer important whether the photographs were taken in Moravia, Bohemia, Portugal, France, Israel, or Jordan, or whether they show Czechs, Portuguese, Frenchmen, Jews, or Arabs. Sobek is no longer strictly concerned with concrete people from  a concrete community; he is, instead, concerned with a more general view of the human condition, human values, relations between people, isolation and uprootedness, faith, love, joy, and a longing for maximum freedom. He is gradually perfecting the highly personal visual compositions of his photographs, defying a number of conventions; the number of secondary motifs and the dramatic quality of the action portrayed are declining; the urban milieus now often give way to the photogenic milieus of empty beaches and large desolate surfaces; an ever greater role is played by the subtle nuances of the gestures of the photographed subjects and by heavy shadows that merely stand in for real people, animals, or things. The narrative and literary aspects of his work are on the decrease, whereas pictorial metaphors are on the rise, thus enabling more interpretations of the actual content of the photos, which are becoming increasingly difficult to describe in words. Also of considerable importance is the precise technique of high-contrast, black-and-white prints, which intensifies the visual experience one derives from these photographs.
    Sobek is not, to be sure, a pioneer of subjective documentary photography. He has made his photographs long after those of Robert Frank, Charles Harbutt, Tony Ray-Jones,  and Carl De Keyzer. And Czech photographers like Josef Koudelka, Viktor Koláø, Antonín Kratochvíl, and Václav Podestát have also preceded him by several years. Nevertheless, he is clearly one of the most talented representatives of today’s younger and middle generations of Czech documentary photography. His Ecce Homo cycle does not dilute his previous works; rather, it enriches Czech subjective documentary photography, adding mature work of profound content, effective artistry, and personal experience, and, recently, achieving considerable success on the international scene as well. Sobek, however, hasn’t been content to remain only with what he knows, as is clear from his most recent works, in which he has tried to make thoughtful, emotionally effective use of colour. He is undoubtedly an excellent photographer, but he is also a good teacher and theorist of photography, as is evidenced by his outstanding articles on theoretical works of Czech avant-garde photography. We are certain to hear much more about him.
                                Vladimír Birgus

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