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

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.