Vlèí med+ 22.5.-6.9.09

Vojtìch V. Sláma
22.5. – 6.9.2009
The work of this artist stems from the principles particular to the photography group Czech Parallax, of which he was a member — in particular, ideas about the use of photographic instruments (a double-lens 6x6 Flexaret brand reflex camera and a Rolleiflex, among others), an emphasis on superbly technically crafted photographs, and, similarly, aiming for an overall poetic character in the resulting photographic images. Sláma’s lifelong fascination with the beauty in ordinary moments, which he captures with exceptional grace, causes the simple situations in his images to seem celebratory, sometimes even sacred, yet without any signs of cheap sentimentality or kitsch. His output is not limited to any particular genre: Among his pictures we find melancholy landscapes, domestic still lifes, portraits and figural motifs — oftentimes in the same photograph. The most important link among the pictures is the artist’s ability to perceive and capture the reality which we desire, the one concealed behind the reality which offers itself. In this way, Vojtìch V. Sláma in his square-format photographs presents a sort of personal diary of an eternal pilgrim in a beautiful and better world.
Lucia L. Fišerová
On view from May 21 through Sept. 5 at Leica Gallery Prague will be older as well as very recent works by the artist.

Public Privacy
of Vojta Sláma
Now and then I had been meeting Vojta Sláma from his childhood; the whole of his great family operated within and around the Brno alternative scene. Later I encountered him as my student at the Secondary School of Arts and Crafts in Brno, where he was fretting about my low pedagogical self-esteem, teaching me tolerance (he repeatedly fell asleep in the class). What I especially liked about him was certain stubbornness; he did not lack self-confidence either. Both these qualities came in handy among his friends in two particularly strong years, out of which originated the Czech Parallax group. In it, he found his way in as a generative author as well as a skilled organizer. Contours of his artistic “construction” began to be gradually revealed. In accordance with the rest of the group, when taking pictures he was using double-eyed reflex cameras, blowing up the photos to square formats; he was one of the first admirers of the 60s (and soon also the 70s and the 30s…); many of his pictures seemed to me, however, extraordinarily sincere, and also less dazzling, stylized and fashionable.

The group does not actually exist for several years now, which is a pity, particularly for its audience — the Czech Parallax was able to attune to and entertain the audience in a great manner (additional thanks!). Where does the whole abandoned sect of the Parallax-confessors wander nowadays?

I do not know how the common orientation came to develop in the Czech Parallax. As far as I remember, the group eventually benefited from thematization of banality and kitsch. Some succeeded in playing with “low art”, others sometimes slipped to that level, over which they intended to levitate, but sometimes there were pictures finding the real meaning of simple motifs and ordinariness. The latter often originated in Sláma’s camera. Today, the group, which had helped him to find himself, was transformed into a certain reception background of his photos. It is not, however, the only context that is relevant in his case.

There is, for instance, the tradition of banality. From the times of the Biedermeier period at the latest, it is platitude or seeming meaninglessness that — being its principal artery — has fed the artistic imagination in our country. Sláma tries to make use of his imagination as little as possible. In my opinion he does not want anything else than to capture the living in his life: festive moments, previsions, enchanting, beauty, happiness, regret… In this aspect as well as in emphasizing his personal involvement he is close to Boøek Sousedík or Milan Pitlach, who are one generation older.

Life is banal quite often. All our lives cannot be identical, and so life is — from the outer perspective — ordinary. There are photographers who, in this stage of recognition, through which all people have to go, apply imagination (which is usually even more boring). But Sláma uniquely takes pictures of his own life and of what he has recognized and understood. He tries to avoid impropriating anything that is not his own. Quite in an old-fashioned manner, he seems to believe in authenticity; in it he could be a descendant of the parental existentialist generation. Only the life feeling of that time is not his. Thanks to his stubbornness he fortunately managed to picture his own. His perceptions are sometimes visually attractive and so they almost veil the meaning of his work. But Sláma does not allow anything to seduce him — he is not a producer of visually dazzling shots about nothing. The viewer usually has to penetrate to the core of his photos, because they are about the world and not about their creator.

When we perceive Sláma’s work in a wider context, it is the ethos connected with it that excels. Sláma is a serious artist and he seems to interweave his life with his work. He resists every superficiality, and the moments he takes his photos of have often a flavor of solemnity. All this contributes to the value of his shots thanks to the connection with his talent and his experience of photographic vision (a mere personal zeal does not guarantee anything). In comparison with the preceding generation, he managed to be more modest and that is why he finds other “pearls on the sea bed” of everyday life.

Vojta Sláma, owing to his concentration, has already circumscribed his own place in the context of present-day photography. In Jan Svoboda’s pictures, the personal world also prevails; it has served him, however, as a material of artistic visions. Jan Svoboda, Miroslav Machotka and perhaps some others provided Sláma with a hint at some of the possibilities how to picture the static world of nature and civilization. In sharp contrast with Sláma is the last wave of photographers, who reflect everyday life with conceptual distance (let us recall Markéta Othová among others) and who focus only on the context of present-day fine art. As far as the so called subjective documentary is concerned, it is the minute craft and the regard for photographic tradition in general that is the common denominator shared also by Sláma; it is different, however, in the fact that subjectivity, such as a mere estranging perspective, is not a good reason for Sláma to publish the picture. This is the real, though invisible border, by which he earns citizenship with serious artists. Photography is a view from the outside, not an internal vision. Nevertheless, Sláma remains an artist who provides his personal guarantee for the “technical pictures” from his camera.

Antonín Dufek


Let’s Go, Katja!
or
A World That Didn’t Happen
but Could Have Happened

There are two kinds of diaries: into the first one, we glue train tickets along with photos of fortuitous women and pressed flowers. We record in them events and reenact routs in minds. We keep these diaries so we will not forget about what was important. There is, however, still another kind of diaries; their records are irregular, and the pictures come forward as if traced. Recorded instances are quiet and empty. Spaces and moments “in between” gradually come to a full meaning by what didn’t happen and what could have happened. We keep these diaries so we will forget about what was not important.

It may be that the stories, which we so stubbornly seek in Vojtìch Sláma’s photographic diary, have actually never taken place. When we have a closer look at the individual pictures, we find out that there is no sign of action at all. They begin as well as end by the click of the release; they are completed by hints. We could even claim that the pictures set out against their own stories — they stop them and they hide from them. That’s why Sláma’s principle of depiction is anti-documentary. The vertical “sight” of the double-eyed reflex camera the author uses, cuts across and fixes the horizontal extent of the view. It thereby optically obstructs potential stories included usually in an oblong format — so characteristic of the documentary photography.

Vojtìch Sláma’s world of photography is a world four times bent into a square — and sometimes as many as eight times since the diagonally composed picture leans and turns as a cog-wheel. Objects from outside overlap into the picture corners, emphasizing thus the emptiness of their meeting-point in the middle. Centers of other photographs are filled with fractions of things slightly falling outside the border. The picture surface is cut apart by the scissors of legs in different perspective shortcuts, from time to time underlined by a horizontal axis of a road, water surface, windowsill or a boundary between two beds. Such photos of hinted things are altered by centrally composed portraits (or rather “still-lives of the face”), in which the author makes use of Christologico-Mariological types, compositionally augmented by a monumentalizing symmetry. The face circled by an aureole or the crown of thorns, or a look of a girl captured under the ice allure into the picture again and again and invite us to share its storylessness. Variable depth of sharpness blurs and relativizes the picture space of foreground and background. Considered in a broad sense — in a combination of a bird’s-eye view, worm’s-eye view and en face — in Sláma’s vast panorama, the surface of recorded reality turns over to all six sides. The constructed skeleton of such a “house of cards” is, nevertheless, fairly unstable. How can it be possible then that the quiet world of Vojtìch Sláma actually firmly stands? What is it that binds it together? Let us try to decipher the answer in the author’s own face, which is often a reticent denominator of photographs. The construction of Sláma’s “box for making pictures” does not require an overlap of the photographer’s faces and his camera. The magic identification of the author with the machine is somewhat loose — and we are watched by four eyes instead of a single big one. The principle of mirroring inside the mechanism enables him to seize the chosen picture. The evil-eyed character of this double-sight goes crosswise. Ghostly self-portraits are far from the end of his acting through photography. A sensitive spectator catches his face many more times, in the form of a haphazard shadow, a deformed reflection on a car hood, an apparition behind the window or a silhouette inscribed on a photographed girl’s dress. It comes out only when the look behind the glass is shifted back a pace — as if the author wanted to make the world behind the photos real by applying his own face, accentuating him who is the creator, the guard and, at the same time, the only direct evidence of its existence. Due to a gradual revealing of the photographs and penetrating into them, it is more and more difficult for us to avoid a pertinacious feeling that without Vojtìch Sláma neither the particular photos, nor the world behind them would exist. It even seems that he can see and record only what he had been waiting for as for an object of (by principle vain) desire. He does not capture “the world around him”. He defines its contours, space and scents only retrospectively — making photos. And this is the essence of that ungraspable exclusivity of the universe presented by Sláma; it does not, however, accept any visitors. The call from the inside of this world is a call for beauty.

Slim as a vase for a single tender flower
A little flute of anger verse and it’s fragil
And beauty sticks as a deer with its hoof stuck
And it breaks up against itself

There is another question hanging over this place: what is the beauty that dwells in his realm? What strikes us most is, above all, its peculiar universality — the “call for beauty” is equally borne in space and time. The desire does not have precise coordinates, which only gradates its ability to fulfill. On the way from one photo to another we wander from a rural environment of Moravian countryside into a city with its retro-charm; the call of nature and the fascination by good old days do not reduce one another. A balladic gloomy bend over the water surface finds its reflection in the sheeny curves of old cars that won’t go. Water, splashed out of the lake, gets frozen in the whirl of a Parisian carrousel. A smoking cigarette in the ashtray on the table or dark footprints in the snow keep in mind for a second him who will be forgotten. And the author sets out once again for a long journey to be able to come across motifs that bring him back home, to the place where things are as close as “an evening over the plate”.

Nevertheless, Vojtìch Sláma does not travel only through space. The steady continuity of his search is also driven by the course of the year. In the sublimated melancholy of photographs, we feel a reflection of sadness of all the four seasons of the year, which, in fluent link-up, maintain an interval between “a joyful expectation of the suggested” and “a quiet memory of the elapsed” empty. And so as soon as in one of the photos Skácel’s “little snow mill made of straw” finishes its creaks “somewhere above us”, in another picture there is the calm summer of Hrubín’s “romance for the bugle” dying away. Sláma’s pictorial invocation of beauty is brought about by the loss of a real place and a constant time; this herewith prevents its anchoring in chronotopos.


To return from the apple to blossom
There is no power left for us
We gave our thanks in late September
And we implored in December

But this sadness from beauty is concealed; it is not even proper to write about it.

Below the woods, where “there is nothing”, on a place where nothing stops, there is a car waiting, with the trunk open. In the front, in the meadow, in an environment not usual for the given scene, there are two swans, fidgeting. Between the swans and the car in the background, in the central space reserved for Christ on the sensed water surface, stands a girl. The girl is a prototype of a frail femme fragile, who is often portrayed in paintings and literature as a young shepherdess in an idyllic landscape. The first image the photo evokes is a realized picture of a folk song: “A girl kept peacocks out at grass / In those pastures of green / Two lads came along to ask her out / Join us, lassie dear!” The photograph bears the title “Let’s Go, Katja!”.

The girl tears out of these circumstances in the same moment; she is actually a part of no pastoral idyll. She is standing at a safe distance from the swans she is watching with concern. At the same time she is being observed by the photographer and impatiently called from the woods. Her persistent existence is, in the framework of installed visual relations, a certain contra-event. It towers in the middle of pictorial plane like an exclamation mark displaced by inverted commas of the swans, breaking and thwarting the temporal and spatial course of a potential journey at the background. The central position on the surface of the picture as well as in the depth of the scene creates a distance in all directions; the figure clutching a kit and a bottle with water in the arms is hereby isolated from all events in the surrounding world. The alarmingly “idyllic” picture functions in a sacred timelessness, which is however comprehensible exclusively in this very instant: in the moment that lasts “on credit”.

And so it is this moment, “full of meaning of what didn’t happen but what could have happened”, when we are silently closing the diary. Katja will go on smiling at the swans and the car will never go away without her. The journeys back and forth are infinitely separated from the picture itself. From all Vojtìch Sláma’s pictures.

Lucia L. Fiserova


Photography is
a double world
When you speak with Vojtìch Sláma about photography and taking photos you come to understand that being a photographer is a lifestyle and that talking about pictures necessarily belongs to this style in the same way as making pictures. With certain exaggeration it is possible to say that a photograph as a process — at the stage of creation or in a discussion — is more interesting than a ready-made photograph, a photograph viewed as an object. The reason may be as follows: the photograph “exists” in many variants and is somewhat void. And meeting the author over his pictures? It splits the universe of possible meanings and ideas into two parts. The picture has suddenly a subjective and an objective version. Here and there something is explained, and what was whirling in the form of fractions and hints is finally connected. It is a dangerous and, at the same time, beautiful moment. The photograph either dies in it or is given an undreamt-of dimension.

Those who have ever taken pictures know the feeling: after seeing someone else’s photos they feel like taking the camera and giving it a try as well… Vojtìch Sláma sometimes speaks about a physical need to make a picture, for all a lost one, just to feel the camera mechanics at work. Taking photos is an addiction in a way. And it is understandable after all; the camera emancipates from the reality (or at worse is a barrier against it) — to have it at hand means stepping aside and being an observer. With the view-finder at our eye or staring at the groundglass we are not “here” anymore, but via the vista we are leaving our position and transcending into a state of an entirely extraordinary presence: out and at the same time, in the most intensive manner, “in”. These are the photographer’s moments of an absolute trance, in which everything stops and where there are only the motif and himself. Perhaps it is this very feeling of peculiarity that attracts and fascinates many people.

Vojtìch Sláma uses his camera as a tool of contemplation and personal understanding. It allows him to introspect the essence, to concentrate on what determines on the instant his world. He likes best his intimate environment where everybody and everything (people, animals but also objects) have their individual destiny, often directly connected with his personality. Sláma does not record them anymore to extend his portfolio; he rather repeatedly recognizes what meaning they have in his life. Year by year a mosaic of photos is gathering in handmade boxes — from time to time you may leaf through it like a diary. Considering one definition sees arts as a way of verifying one’s existence, such a formulation holds true, in my opinion, in case of the activity of the given kind doubly. The picture is a mirror full of variable meanings and the author is a bridge between the past and the present. To come back and introspect means getting always new answers. Over the years in the course of which we are accompanied by photographic picture, it has been (hopefully) explained what it is and what it is not; the original magic, however, still works. Sláma is, in this sense, a respectful observer with a sense of exceptionality of the moment rather than a photographer longing for treating “his topic” and creating oeuvre. The criteria and the context of the discipline remain at the background, the leading element being always intuition.

Now where are the sources of Sláma’s work? The answer to this question is clear: his family and the Czech Parallax group, both to a great extent. The Parallax, as a child of his secondary school studies, was — in its liberal approach (with the only rulle — use of 6 × 6 cm format) and juvenile severity — an environment in which everything could be seen as never after. Its members had (and still have) a gift of identifying photography with life, trips, happenings, enthusiasm for old things of quality design (e.g. Tatra cars) as well as pleasures that belong to a certain age only. A close coexistence of several years developed individual talents and has been an essential human and artistic experience to the future. Although the Czech Parallax does not exist anymore, it has a sort of alternative in regular Wednesday sessions in Brno Café Steiner, indefatigably called by Vojtìch Sláma. There, at one table, are seated in various formations not only former members of the Parallax, but also their friends, both photographers and non- photographers.

Vojtìch Sláma deals with ordinary things. It is important for him to show the world as an experience which may come unexpected even through the most ordinary things and situations. He is in contrast with the theory, which would — on a place where it is necessary to watch and be silent — probably speak of the role of a banal topic, retro-approaches, the influence of predecessors and much more. If we get rid of the obsession to permanently reflect the discipline, we will see the author as a human being who is openly enchanted by the surrounding world — which is perhaps quite sufficient.

Jiøí Pátek

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Vojtìch V.Sláma

Born (1974) in Brno, Czech Republic; his life has been connected with Brno and Jevišovice. A graduate of Secondary School of Artistic Crafts Brno, a member of group named Èeská Paralaxa (Czech Parallax). A freelance photographer. At present a student of 2nd year of Institute of Creative Photography of Faculty of Arts and Science, Silesian University, Opava, Czech Republic.

Comes from a family of art tradition. First contacted with photo making at primary school. Only at the age of sixteen shows a deeper interest in photography. After a series of twists and turns — studies at Secondary School of Engineering and an attempt to obtain a professional photography education, accompanied by differences of opinion with the apprentice school concept — Sláma finally settled at SŠUØ Brno; he graduated in 1996. During his secondary school studies a member of Jiøí Víšek’s class. Still at SŠUØ Brno, a co-founder of the Èeská Paralaxa photo group (1995); the double-lens 6 × 6 cm reflex camera, related to the creative philosophy of Èeská Paralaxa, has remained his sovereign apparatus for his production up to present days.

Among author’s significant works there is a cycle devoted to female figure skaters (carried out in Rondo Hall in Brno, 1997) or a cycle concerning the ballet ensemble of the National Theatre, Ostrava (a project done for Igor Vejsada, 1998—1999).

Vojtìch Sláma’s inherent need is travelling. He travels a lot; whether it is Quebec, India or Paris; for the author it is always a unique opportunity to acquire a new view of well-thought-out things, to chase away routine and to find a fresh desire for further production.