Vojtěch Sláma
Wolf's Honey
22. 5. — 6. 9. 2009
Gallery Vojtěch Sláma
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. Antonín Dufek
Vojtěch Sláma was 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 Česká Paralaxa (Czech Parallax) and Steiner Group. A freelance photographer. At present a student of master's degree at Institute of Creative Photography of Faculty of Arts and Science, Silesian University, Opava, Czech Republic (Bachelor of Art, 2006).
Among author’s significant works there is a cycle devoted to female figure skaters (carried out in Rondo Hall in Brno, 1997), cycle concerning the ballet ensemble of the National Theatre, Ostrava (a project done for Igor Vejsada, 1998—1999) and his books Expert’s Still lives (2003) and Wolf’s Honey 2004.