Jizerska 50 | Visions of six

14. 1. 2021 - 11. 4. 2021

A group of six distinct personalities of Czech photography drew inspiration from the cross-country skiing competition Jizerska 50 that became the motive of their collective exhibition, each capturing the event through a unique visual conceptualization.

VIRTUAL TOUR TO THE EXHIBITION HERE

Jan Sibik (*1963) captured the event with his characteristic reportage style, although he has never actively pursued sport photography before. His black and white photographs treat the event as a story of a competition filled with struggles and joys experienced by its contestants. Quite the opposite, Marketa Navratilova (*1972) specializes in sport photography; she knows exactly which angle to use to create an emotionally charged photographic narration able to capture the unique dynamic of this winter sport. Jiri Langpaul (*1974) is the only one of the six who has been photographing Jizerska 50 for a number of years. He repeatedly returns to Jizerske mountains to take portrait photographs of the contestants; some of them amateurs, professionals, men and women of all ages and performance categories. Unlike Langpaul, Tomas Vocelka (*1965) perceives Jizerska 50 as a whole from a birds-eye view enabled by photographing from above from a small sport airplane. This gives rise to very strong compositions where the zigzagging snake of contestants forms a compact image with the surrounding nature. Daniel Hustak (*1990) has an entirely different approach to photography. He composes the overall feeling from singularities, maybe even redundancies, from small items and minimalistic aspects that all together form the competition. His photographs are visually minimalistic, very clean and devoid of any concrete people. The last artist of the six is an distinct personality of nude and fashion photography. Lukas Dvorak (*1982) doesn’t photograph at the event of the competition, he seeks to capture his perception of the race through the beauty and perfection that is a woman’s body; a body full of life and energy, life and energy which can also be found in each and every one of the contestants of this difficult and beautiful race.