By the end of the eighties, citizens in Czechoslovakia were experiencing dark, stagnant times caused by peak normalization. Many dreamed of when the era of unfreedom would end along with the communist regime, which partnered with ‘the Soviet Union, for all times and nothing else’ closing the country and its citizens behindthe iron curtain. Then, only a few expected an early change caused by the events following in November of 1989.
Even during the dark ‘infinite times’ of normalization, normal life for the citizens resumed. They remained simple, with ordinary joy and worries. It was during this era, around the mid-eighties, that Tomáš Vocelka started photographing the life surrounding him. He was inspired by his father, Vladimír, and by a well- recognized and significant Czech photographer Gustav Aulehla (1931-2021), whom he encountered in a Silesian town, Krnov.
Vocelka’s photographs from the eighties mirror the viewpoint of a twenty-year-old student of ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague), who observes inquisitively and sometimes with fascination the people surrounding him and their lives. „I was amazed how the images Gustav Aulehla took could retell stories. However, I found them quite sad. Then, I saw the world differently (despite all the distress associated with the peak of normalization, which I of course felt). Almost everything in my vicinity was playful, mysterious, and full of magic. After all, I was around twenty. Today, when my age is nearing sixty, I completely understand Aulehla’s point of view…, “states Vocelka.
The author formerly photographed similarly to Aulehla who formed his art based on an inner need, without the core ambition being centered on exhibiting or presenting the work. He focuses on a human subjects and their existence in his previous work rather than shifting his perspective toward the former totalitarian regime. Still, the theme inherently persisted in certain photographs, such as the image of Soviet occupation soldiers in front of the Prague astronomical clock or the view of the feared black soviet car Volga and the military patrol stationed at Republic Square.
The images in the Leica Gallery café emerged between 1985-1988 and are the first showcase from Vocelka’s book „Then, at the End of Eternity “. The author, in collaboration with the platform Leica+, is preparing more images and a seminar on Tuesday 11th of February at 17:30 in Leica Gallery. Apart from the photographs from the eighties, further highlights of the present work of the author will be displayed.
(CV) Tomáš Vocelka (*1965) is a journalist and a photographer originally from Krnov. He started taking photographs when he studied at a high school in Krnov. Vocelka began his journalist career at the beginning of the nineties at the weekly news journal Region, operating in the south of Moravia and Silesia. Initially, he started as a photographer but later additionally focused on writing. In 2000, he moved to Prague and worked in various positions in the central editorial office of MF DNES. He has been chief editor of said journal for more than ten years. From 2016 to the beginning of 2025, he worked in the editorial office of Aktuálně.cz.
He is a winner of the national photography competition Sony World Photography Awards in the category Architecture | Professional (2021) and the grantee from Czech Press Photo 2019. His images were published in many local and global media (for ex. the title page of a Spanish journal National Geographic Viajes).
Photographers:
Eva Bystrianská
Lenka Grabicová
Jolana Havelková
Jana Hunterová
Gabriela Sauer Kolčavová
Tereza Kopelentová
Tereza Jobová
Wlasta Laura
Eva Mořická
Michaela Pospíšilová Králová
Bára Prášilová
Dita Pepe
Kateřina Sýsová
Petra Vlčková
Curator:
Alžběta Čermáková
The group exhibition Sister of a Sister of a Sister presents the work of fourteen women photographers who make up the first modern female Czech photoclub Sisters in Photography. As the name suggests, mutual support and motivation, cooperation and sharing of the creative process and experimentation is the principal bond between the group’s members. Their work is diverse, thematically rather disconnected. However, in themselves and in their shared purpose, the members bring mutual feminine solidarity into the art milieu of photography which tends to individualism and competition. They pick up the mostly male tradition of photoclubs, which goes back all the way to the beginning of the photographic medium, and following in the footsteps of foreign women photoclubs, they add in the feminist tradition of sisterhood. It is in this spirit and at their creative intersections that the collective wants to present itself in the future.
The fourteen photographers form a collective in which its members retain their autonomy in pursuing feminine as well as other subjects. Even though the former are present in their works somewhat as a matter of course, both the exhibition and the group are not putting themselves under the label of ‘female photography’, and so the feminist optics is only one of the many identities manifested by the club. Each author brings in her own experience, vision, and manner of working. Exploring the exhibition we thus pass through different worlds and perspectives as reflected by the opening text which lets the various characters and motifs from all the photographs speak and invites us to listen.
This exhibition consists of a selection of early photographs created by Jiří Šámal, which were taken during the 1950‘s. The core theme among them is the form and life of the previous Czechoslovak metropolis, which was discovered by the future cameraman while he was still a student at the Production, later Camera, faculty at a Prague university, FAMU. Near his then-student accommodation, so-called ‘faculty dorms’ that are still located on Hradební Street on the edge of Staré Město, Šámal discovered some of the first photographic subjects.
Photography did not solely represent the spontaneous creative need that Jiří Šámal brought to Prague from his childhood in south Moravia. It further highlighted the mandatory part and then the core means of film education, which at first greatly outweighed personal work with a camera. In one of his first collections, Šámal concentrated on themes from ‘Na Františku’ in Prague. Within this ‘district inside a district’, the future photographer and cameraman managed to capture the historic atmosphere of the previous peasant enclave right before it was drastically changed through sanitation interventions and the reconstruction of the grounds of the previous Anežkovský Monastery.
The object of great visual interest for Šámal were the events on Prague’s embankments, which not only represented a place to enjoy oneself, including fishing but also the intense work environment, as can be showcased in the collection ‘Fish Boxes on the Vltava River’. Within the collection, Šámal captured the dynamic of a traditional catch of the South Bohemian Carp, temporarily placed in Vltava. Additional subjects, such as lonely pedestrian on the Town Hall stairs, saleswomen with scales in front of a shop in Melantrichova Street, the delivery of coal on a ladder in now a demolished part of old Žižkov or the automobile Tatraplan driving in front of a two-wheeler in Hradební street add to the perception of the atmosphere of the city during the fifties. In the background of the scenery of the ‘olden times’, which evokes the era of the first republic and the Austrian monarchy, the big city life melts together with a certain abandonment of spaces due to the grip of the communist totality. The unifying point of view on that version of Prague remains its picturesque plasticity, which is further highlighted by the photographer thanks to the help of lighting contrast.
Petr Šámal
(CV) Jiří Šámal (*1934) is primarily a cameraman. He entered the world of film in the Czechoslovak New Wave era. His contribution to this phenomenon, on the one hand, is framed through the collaboration on an internationally awarded graduate’s movie ‘Mouthful’ by the director Jan Němec, on the other hand, is highlighted through his film camera in movies, which after its premiere, or even before its completion, because of its content, moral overlap, or expressive harshness, it was later transported to the vault. This included the movies ‘Shame’ (1967) by director Ladislav Helge and the early works of Hynek Bočan such as ‘Honor and Glory’ (1968) and ‘Juvie Detention’ (1968, finished in 1990). During this era, Jiří Šámal worked also on several other cinematic artworks. He was presented with the Barrandov Trilobite award for ‘Getaway’(1967), directed by Štěpán Skalský, thanks to its mysterious and dark atmosphere he outdid the original literary version initially aimed at children audiences. Additionally, resulting from the previously mentioned factors, we can consider it one of the first Czech ‘road movies’. During this time, Šámal worked as a cameraman on many awarded early television movies, such as ‘How Theatre is Made’ (director Jiřina Pokorná-Makoszová, 1969) or ‘Barometer’ (director Antonín Moskalyk, 1969).
Later, Šámal stood behind the camera while creating a number of films, from which many became well-recognizable for the spectators. The director of many of the them was Antonín Moskalyk (‘Grandmother’, 1971; ‘Third Prince’, 1982; ‘Cuckoo in a Dark Forest’, 1984), with whom he too shot a television series, ‘Panopticon of the City of Prague’ (1987). Other directors that Šámal worked with include Jiří Krejčík, Jaromír Bolek, and Jaroslav Papoušek. Alongside his film career, Jiří Šámal is also a co-author of audiovisual projects and a creator of lighting concepts for many historical monuments (ex. Carevec castle in Bulgaria). Šámal’s artistic qualities were acknowledged by the Czech Cameraman Association, which presented him with a Lifetime’s Achievement Award in 2021. During this year, on the occasion of a lifetime jubilee, Jiří Šámal has received an award from the City of Třebíč, his birthplace, for his contribution to Czech cinematography.
Šámal’s work as a photographer is frequently connected to filming locations. If Šámal wasn’t behind the film camera, he tirelessly captured everything around him, from taking portraits of actors and crew members, to people preparing the scenes. Furthermore, Jiří Šámal also devoted his time to documentary and advertising photography, however, he spent the most of his time photographing for his enjoyment. Therefore, his archive is a treasure chest of themes from cinematography, everyday life, social events, fine arts, and natural and urban scenes.
Jiří Hanke is one of the most important personalities of contemporary Czech photography, not only as a great photographer, but also as a tireless curator, who prepared over 450 exhibitions between 1977 and 2024, and as an organizer of photographic workshops. The most famous of his extensive photographic works are the series People from Podprůhon, about the disappearing traditional way of life of the inhabitants of the old part of Kladno, and Views from the Window of My Flat, in which he for twenty-two years photographed various situations and building modifications in the small space of the square below his apartment, Entrepreneurs, consisting of gently ironic portraits of Kladno’s pioneers of private business, and the portrait series Echoes of a Generation, based on physiognomic and psychological comparisons of parents and their offspring. He has worked on all of them for a long time, but while he has already completed his older works, the Impressions of Generations series spans nearly four decades, and even the current exhibition does not represent its final form.
Compositionally simple photographs with direct views of the subjects into the lens and through it into the eyes of the viewers, and with an important role of the home or work environment, are stylistically loosely related to the iconic works of August Sander. Portraits of celebrity artists and athletes, as well as “ordinary” people, fascinate with the juxtapositions of the physical appearance and sometimes differences in the faces and figures of grandparents, parents, children and grandchildren. But also by the similarities and contrasts of their facial expressions or clothing. Significant details of the environment also play an important role. In contrast to the 1998 book edition of Echoes of a Generation, the current exhibition at Leica Gallery Prague works much more with time, as it includes portraits of the same people and in many cases their children and grandchildren created over decades. On the one hand, it is a picture of the inevitable ageing that marks the faces and bodies of the subjects, but on the other hand, it also shows that the genes of the portrayed are carried on in their descendants. Hanke often makes do with only a few portraits at different time intervals, but four generations of the Povondrovi family are represented in thirty photographs. He shows that even at the age of eighty, he is still creating works of extraordinary strength in terms of content and visuals. This is illustrated by excerpts from Karel Greif’s new film about Jiří Hanke, which can be seen at the exhibition.
Vladimír Birgus
Jiří Hanke
Born on 15 April 1944 in Kladno, where he still lives. After graduating from the eleven-year high school he started working in the Kladno branch of the State Savings Bank. In his childhood, he took photographs under the influence of his father, but in his youth, he was mainly interested in music (he played guitar in the beat group Barclay and performed solo with his own repertoire) and created collages from magazine clippings. He has been a systematic photographer since 1974, when he became a member of the creative group Ateliér in Kladno. He focuses mainly on large-scale series of documentary and portrait photographs, which are often created over many years. His works have been presented in more than a hundred solo exhibitions and are part of many important collections (e.g. the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, the National Gallery in Prague, the Prague City Gallery, the Moravian Gallery in Brno, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris and the International Center of Photography in New York). His books include Views from the Window of My Flat (1994, 2013), People from Podprůhon (1995), Imprints of a Generation (1998), Other Views (together with Jiřina Hankeová, 2002), Stop Time (2003), Jiří Hanke: Photographs (2008), Kladno Under the Skin (2013), Searching for America (2014) and Kladno Velvet (2029).
In 1977 he founded the Small Gallery in the Savings Bank in Kladno. He held 433 exhibitions there until its closure in 2019. Since 2019, he has prepared another 20 exhibitions for the Cabinet of Photography at Kladno Castle. In 2011, the Association of Professional Photographers of the Czech Republic awarded him the title of Personality of Czech Photography for Lifetime Achievement, and in 2014 he received the Kladno City Award. His wife Jiřina, son Michael, daughter Lucie and grandsons Dominik and Vojtěch are also devoted to photography.
Lalibela is a city in southern Ethiopia, primarily known thanks to its unique churches embedded within bedrock. These churches were not built but rather carved into the stone, which makes them truly exceptional pieces of art. Lalibela is one of the most fundamental locations for the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and is often called ‘New Jerusalem’. The city is a spiritual center and pilgrimage site for thousands of believers.
What is very special about Lalibela is the atmosphere of the location. Churches embedded within bedrock are separated into two main groups symbolizing heaven and earth. The most well-known church is Bete Giyorgis (Church of St. George), which has the shape of a Greek cross and is considered a masterpiece of architecture.
Every year, especially during Ethiopian Christmas, thousands of pilgrims from all over the world enter Lalibela to experience spiritual ceremonies and prayers. Therefore, Lalibela is a place where history, spirituality, and iconic architecture meet. All of that is in the middle of the beautiful Ethiopian landscape.
Ladislav Dibdak
Robert Riedl (1942-2002) was an ambitious amateur documentary photographer, who captured everyday moments without any aesthetical add-ons.
After graduating from high school in Jihlava, he studied at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at ČVUT (Czech Technical University) in Prague. He devoted his professional career to the national TV broadcaster Československá televize (Czechoslovak TV), where he started working as an assistant cameraman and later on worked in the Department of technological development as a sound engineer. Although he is not known by most of the current audience, he was not completely unknown as a photographer. I found dozens of his photographs that were published in newspapers and magazines between 1964 and 1966. For example, his photographs were published on the pages of the magazine Mladý svět alongside photographers such as Miroslav Hucek, Leoš Nebor, or Zdeněk Thom. He truly adored the work of Miloň Novotný, Josef Koudelka and Marie Šlechtová.
The central theme in his works is a young person. We are transported to the streets of both Prague and even villages, to everyday work life, to moments of joy shared by young people in both our country and abroad through his photographs. He photographs in schools, in aquaparks, in music clubs, during dancing lessons, during hitch-hiking trips, and also in military service or Spartakiad. He tries to be everywhere, where something is going on.
His publishing work that took place over multiple years started thanks to his first photography exhibition in the Klub cinema in 1963. The exhibition was then started by Dr. Ludvík Souček who wrote about Robert Riedl the following: „… he works in the middle of television and movie cameras. He has a truly cultured perspective and an amazing desire to photograph, which did not disappear even after shooting hundreds of movies. His photos are captured on film, he doesn’t concern himself with grain, with additional light, or blur caused by movement. He captures images everywhere, but not of everything. He presents his world of young people, as it is in various situations.“
In the case of Robert Riedl, this is a reminder of an author, who undoubtedly belongs to the history of Czech photography. The thirteen enlarged photographs showcased in Leica Gallery Prague Café are after a long time a small mosaic of the work created by the talented photographer, although the processing of his archive is not yet finished.
MgA. Daniel Šperl, Ph.D., curator
The Nineties are the summarium of an ambitiously conceived program. Dana Kyndrová, from the start of her career, focused on the photographic recording and eventually publication of testimony on timeless social questions. They embody an authentic realism that represents a wide movement in Czech culture, originally arising in opposition to the realism known as socialist, or in other words the doctrine of official propaganda.
If humanistic photography should wish to capture and transmit knowledge of actual people, it needs to be open not only to its viewers, but equally to its subjects. As a responsible documentarist, Kyndrová understandably respects those who do not wish to be photographed. At the same time, she also finds it unacceptable to create scenes she staged herself and then present the images from the staging as documentation of spontaneous action. Instead, she prefers patience, making informal contact and allowing the photography to take place naturally. And if she has no desire to manipulate with the actors or the viewers, it should be no surprise that she herself intends to remain free of any illusions.
The fall of the Communist regime at the end of 1989 was an event that Kyndrová, as a photographer, had no intention of missing, yet she retained her individualistic standpoint of scepticism towards all mass phenomena. New speakers held forth from new platforms, yet the applauding hands were often the same ones that she saw waving in approval toward the previous regime. In one interview, Kyndrová recalled that over a decade after the revolution, she encountered still in state service – at Prague Castle no less – one secret police officer she had photographed during May Day in 1983, as a security guard for the officials’ stage as the disciplined socialist public stood watching.
And just as the persistence of this particular detail from a Communist-era May Day demands our attention, we can also find in Kyndrová’s photographic cycles further indications of how strongly there resounds, in many different settings, the deformation of Communist ideology and official socialism. Or in parallel, to follow the pendulum of events as they swing towards senseless excesses of bodily liberation, once relieved of totalitarian strictures.
The Nineties does not work to evoke nostalgic moods, but more to provoke thoughtful reflection. For if we are not all situated in agreement upon social matters, then we cannot perceive either the past, or the world itself …
Dana Kyndrová has a sharply outlined view of what she finds interesting, what she expects in a wide range of social circles, and where to go looking for it. She can cast her eye of the lives of her contemporaries, speak with them, and above all photograph them. It springs forth from observation, as well as from her critical evaluation, examining the connections and working towards deriving conclusions… In this way, it seems that she proceeds from subject to subject, in each instance tracking down their characteristics and grasping the respective essences. For this reason as well, The Nineties retains the traditional division into chapters. Yet all the same, the wide range of subject matter, like all parts of the oeuvre, is linked through the author’s own motivations.
Dana Kyndrová is intent on nothing less than human fate. It is a subject that she found quickly in her youth and to which she remains faithful = for well over half a century. This longstanding heritage represents, for her, a challenge that does not let up and cannot be overlooked. Humanity may well intrigue her in the word’s most general sense, yet the medium of photography allows the transmission of, at best, only what people do, what they pay attention to, and how in each case their surroundings look…
Inner life is not to be seen.
Yet all the same, Kyndrová points equally to what remains, by principle, outside the image. However much she gazes at the exterior manifestations, she is not limited to the shaping of individual moments. What makes this possible is the balance between the choice of the shots and the sense for their thematic inclusion into a planned cycle. The author grants her publications the form of a story, a visual literature, as she says – though understood of course as a factual one. In The Nineties, this one-time point of view intersects with the standpoint of mature experience. With the passage of time, the original perspective increases in its drama, offering the transformation of immediate insights into a likeness.
The ninth book by Dana Kyndrová is therefore an expression of her mission, and hence of her personal fate. After all, photography shows not only what it set out for itself; it also points directly toward it.
Josef Moucha, curator
Dear visitors,
please be advised that the photographs in the „Erotic Show“ series (located in the last room) contain sexually explicit imagery. Please take this into consideration when deciding to view these works.
Thank you
The photography beginnings of Jan Mihaliček (*1965) fell to the time before 1989. He primarily photographed the Czechoslovak community that revolved around skateboarding and snowboarding and since 1987 collaborated with multiple samizdat projects. From December 1989, he worked as a photojournalist for „Lidové noviny“ newspaper. He photographed not only in Czechoslovakia but in various other countries worldwide. After the departure of the Soviet troops from Afghanistan, he traveled there with Jaromír Štětina to create a series of reportages through which he was the first to uncover the previously unconfirmed existence of Russian prisoners from the Afghan war in Pakistan. He first attended humanitarian trips to wartime Yugoslavia and Nagorno-Karabakh with the „Lidové noviny“ newspaper Foundation which later transformed into a well-respected organization, „Člověk v tísni“ (People in Need). In 1994, he was a part of the preparatory team of the news magazine Týden and he was one of its photographers. In 1997, he won the 1st prize in the Czech Press Photo competition in the category of current report – reportage for his report from flooded Ostrava. At the beginning of the new millennium, he switched to becoming a freelance photographer which remained his occupation till today. Currently, he takes an interest in social thematic as both a photographer and a cameraman. He develops his work by using classic black-and-white document in the spirit of the traditions of humanist photography.
The exhibition ‘To my Prague citizens’ follows up on the 2018 exhibition ‘I (don’t) understand my Prague citizens…’ in Café Kampus. The author photographs Prague daily, hence, the exhibition displayed in the Leica Gallery Prague Café consists of newly taken photographs all captured within the last year. The connection of Leica camera and black-and-white, rather contrasting tonality, is the author’s signature. The photographs oscillate on the verge of documentary photographs, street photography and classic humanistic photography with artistic accent, with the search for specific lighting conditions, and most importantly the contrast of light and shadows.
Jan Mihaliček
The immersive and wide-ranging photographic world of Vladimir Birgus opened its doors to colour back in the 1980s, that is to colour in its full saturation and evocative messaging, during a time when inventive use of colour was highly unusual in the context of Czech documentary photography. His colour configurations were since the beginning deliberate, conceived almost like a painting. Birgus’ often ghostly scenes not dissimilar to staged modulation despite not being conceived as such were conceptualised with careful attention to colour and specific lighting which supports the tones and plasticity of the visual work. Earlier photographs were laden with yellow, blue and black, with the later emergence of increasingly intense red coupled with a gradual near disappearance of yellow. Red is an extroverted colour, commanding attention and rousing emotions. The same can be said of Birgus’ work generally, although it is also headed towards calm and a certain type of visual contemplation. We realise this most clearly when examining photographs that don’t capture people, surprisingly to some. Here colour intensity reaches its maximum, the empty, almost abstract spaces are however charged with emotion and concealed explosion of possible interpretations and mental narratives. Red and Blue, an almost Stendhalian paraphrase, draw us into the photograph to the point, where we viewers become another actor in the photographed reality, not in the least indifferent to the event photographed. Somewhere in those moments, art is born.
The beginnings of Birgus’ work date back to 1972. From his then-black-and-white photography, we can see the photographer’s intentional search for situations which outgrow humanistic documentaries towards a subjective visual narrative open to individual interpretation. With the advent of colour photography in the 1980s, this quality in Birgus’ photography deepened. It is safe to say that moments and situations unfold slightly differently in colour as opposed to in a monochrome photographic world. If classic black-and-white photography tends to work with a snapshot of a very short time and with a certain form of aesthetic composition often leading to a condensed visual shortcut, colour, particularly in Birgus’ work, expands the mental field of the image. Time expands and stretches out, colour doesn’t rush, and components rarely included in black-and-white narrative come into play or have life breathed into them, as they might seem banal or uninteresting in the black-and-white composition. The photogenic nature of colourful scenes evokes a sense of theatricality, stagendness and unreality which is paradoxical since the truthfulness of colour ought to be more complex. I believe Birgus knows in which emotional and compositional plane colours work. He doesn’t rush to make a point – after all, he resisted this even in his black-and-white work. He knows how to condense and lighten an image while maintaining visual intensity and narrative expressivity. His work can then have many points, or hints of meaning. He likes to ‘compose’ in planes, drawing on the geometry of shadows and surfaces. Surfaces and planes naturally divide and give rise to space; sometimes we must wonder if it is no longer about abstract hints, about emptying or the autonomy of colourful narrative. Sometimes when I gaze at Birgus’ photographs, I feel a comforting warm touch of sunset’s rays and the pulse of the day quieting and slowing, with contours sharpening as the day passes by. I notice the shapes and am warmed by the possibility of imagining narratives and events. Yet Birgus works masterfully with dark and the harshest of lights as well. He has an eye for situations where characters are in shadows or their fragments seem motionless, yet so much is happening narratively. I’m glad Birgus detests the haze and insists on firm demarcations. The bounds of light and shadow seem acceptable only when contrasted to the maximum. The humour of Birgus’ photographs remains in the distinct smile of colour where composition, clustering, shadow and gesture are definitive in a way only colour photography can present. And Vladimir Birgus as well.
Martin Dostal, curator
To get in the immediate proximity to people who, in the modern, technology-focused era still live in a traditional way of life and are highly connected to nature is something, that piqued my interest. Hopefully, I managed to capture something in their glances, that would be hard to find in our own. I sincerely hope, that their faces and expressions will have the same intense effect on you, as they do on me.
I captured these photographs in parts of Ethiopia, where the southern tribes Arbore, Dassanech, Hamar, Nyangatom, Suri, and Konso live.
Veronika Mašková
Veronika Mašková loves photography and devotes herself to the art. She is truly a master of many genres. She is a fitness trainer, alpinist, traveller, and one of the founding members of the street photography group called ‘Streetphoto is not only a click on the street’. She continuously returns to the premises of Leica Gallery Prague, whether as an author or a curator.
The exhibition ‘The Archive of Hidden Meanings’ demonstrates various showcases of both Czech and Slovak documentary photography, as presented by the works of three authors succeeding by generations. More specifically, they are the works of Pavel Dias (1938-2021), Tibor Husár (1952-2013), and Karina Golisová (*1997). In the center of their focus is an individually thinking and acting person who also plays a part in numerous social circles. Hence, a person who is a part of both ‘small’ and ‘big’ historical events. The combined quality of all three authors, despite their different time-space starting points, is nonchalant and yet brilliantly pointed conveying the mood and atmosphere change, transformation is terms of society, but even inside of an individual.
The exhibition ‘The Archive of Hidden Meanings’ is the initiative of the Foundation of Milota Havránkova, which supports the annual creation of a project presenting the work of a pair of already established photographers from the Czech Republic and Slovakia, supplemented by the work of a beginner artist.
STORIES // FACES
Life stories written in the faces of both known and unknown men
“The creation of a single world comes from a huge number of fragments and chaos.”
Hayao Miyazaki
Kevin V. Ton follows up and develops on the tradition of classic documentary photography, the resulting images are black and white, mostly in a classical 35 mm film format. He combines very close details, still life and its surroundings, and even a reporting approach. He perceives photographs as ‘expanded memory of the mankind’ without which certain situations would not be recorded. ‘I think about what, where, and why I take photos, but I also photograph based on my intuition. I take in the surrounding events, but I never photograph in a chaotic matter. The preparation before I go somewhere is very important to me. I conduct research, I find out what that given place offers, and then I mostly work with intuition. However, it is crucial to combine both logic and emotion.”
(Interview for the cultural magazine UNI, May 2023 – Helena Musilová, chief curator G HMP)
Kevin V. Ton is a freelance photographer and a recipient of numerous awards. During his life, he dedicated his time to live, black and white photography with a focus on humanistic, documentary photography, especially in terms of long-term projects. He has been dedicated to street photography for so many years now.