fotograf 7 - editorial

editor /pavel banka/

Dear readers,

The present issue of FOTOGRAF is dedicated to the “new staged photography.” This subtitle has been selected deliberately, in order to set current approaches to staged photography apart from those of the past. This does not imply a renunciation of the past – it is simply to state an awareness of the considerable shift that this area of photography has undergone, both abroad and in the Czech lands. What is it that drives some photographers, and other artists using the medium, to stage their shots beforehand? One could surely find dozens of reasons, but it is perhaps more fruitful to contemplate the transformations of this motivation over time.

If in the early days photography was often driven by the urge to prove at all costs that it indeed was an art form, and that in its freedom of expression it could be as independent from reality as is painting (e.g., the period of Pictorialist Symbolism), in various other periods to come, the reasons for opting for a very often demanding staging of the photographic image changed. Surrealism brought a provocative way of staging which attacked the values of the established aesthetic. The first post-war wave of arranged photography in the Czech lands involved above all the decorative romanticizing endeavors of the 1960s and 1970s, from which only Saudek’s pseudo-social, but then surprisingly fresh and provocative scenes differed.

The next wave of interest in staged photography to become dominant in Czech and Slovak photography emerged in the 1980s (a movement that had reverberations until the early 1990s), but eventually fell into oblivion. The theatricality of their post-surrealist gestures, as well as the fairy-tale elements of the famous “Slovak school” has become a thing of the past. It should nonetheless be said that this generation played a significant and positive role in the context of Czech and Slovak culture of the day, bringing a certain air of freedom into the rigidity of the regime ruling during those times. In spite of this, today it all seems like a noncommittal, and slightly naive game. In contrast, those actions inquiring into the issues of personal identity that originated at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s have not lost their contemporary appeal. It was at that time that several visual artists became involved in the medium of photography, hovering in their work on the edge of conceptual art and the post-modern photographic image or video. One of the most notable projects of that era is Václav Stratil’s cycle Řeholní pacient (Monastic Patient). I see this work as a kind of milestone – opening a new, and in fact contemporary, era. In contrast to the previous generation of conceptual artists, who were concerned merely with the event itself, and photography as only a way of recording it, the photographic image or installation (or video-installation) now became the end product of the artist’s activity.

It is interesting to note that this generation of visual artists who began working with photography in the 1990s has far more tangible links to the work of Václav Zykmund, and the 1940s group RA than to the “Slovak wave” of the 1980s. Even though the abovementioned trend of the turn of the 1980s and 1990s is still alive today (alongside with Stratil we must mention at least Milena Dopitová), its existential and symbolic moods are also becoming outdated. In the recent years, new approaches have emerged, which use staging, construction or the installation of scenes. Among the key 3 are Jeff Wall and Philip-Lorca diCorcia. New approaches to staging are particularly evident in the new British photography of the last decade. Staged or constructed photographs are often on the cutting edge between photographic documentary and a seemingly objective record. A certain strangeness which distinguishes these photographs is often subtle and in-ostentatious, and we perceive it only as a part of the overall sensation they evoke. As for the youngest Czech photographers, following a protracted period of being “tired of staging”, when documentary or intimate personal themes became predominant, together with a search for the post-modern photographic image in purely banal subject matter, as well as revealing echoes of Becher’s “new topography”, there suddenly and recently appeared a trend towards staged and constructed photography as a natural challenge to the newly arisen establishment of the Czech photographic scene, which had for a long time become overrun by post-modern quotations and work with the trivial.

It is paradoxical that in some Central and Eastern European countries there hitherto lingered, and continues to linger on, an involvement in the aforementioned staged photography which rises from a generational sensibility – be it an effort to introduce a streak of originality, or even a conscious escape from reality, so typical of the 1980s, and the fresh interest in staging will thus probably catch them at the phase of a belated flight from this area of interest, when it is in fact a reinvented documentary photography that is seen as very vital and liberating. I have in mind particularly our neighboring countries, Poland and Slovakia. An interesting situation arises there, where for various reasons there coexist absolutely antagonistic tendencies. Even though this could be said of any period in history, it still seems to me that today this intermingling of trends has given rise to a chaos of unprecedented intensity. The fact that new Pictorialists have emerged on the local scene, who unabashedly quote “old sources” while using the new opportunities afforded by digital photography, or their hybrid forms with analog photography, toward a new shift in the photographic image, makes the overall situation even more amusing.

I believe that at last the time is coming when theoreticians and critics of contemporary art will be no longer able to make do with just a few well-established names as a sort of etalons, guaranteeing the right trend, which they often used as yardsticks for passing judgment on new work, and they will be forced to venture on the precarious ice of a new, unplumbed surface. For observing trendiness as the main criterion of success will no longer get you very far. All of a sudden, there have mushroomed more trends than one can survey. Even so, it seems to me there remains for all these tendencies a criterion of contemporariness. It is the loss of interest in an academic perfection and vapid aestheticism, and the viewers’ readiness to receive a message far more complex than that conveyed by merely a visually striking and well-made picture alone. Even in photographs that are entirely non-figural, one can increasingly perceive the moment of a personal, almost intimate experience, and perhaps a merely suspected social subtext. This is absolutely true also for what we also call the new staged photography.


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