Nude photographs are the most popular and most frequently exploited topic in the Czech photography also by many renowned artists such as František Drtikol, Karel Ludwig or Jan Saudek. Despite not always favourable circumstances, in 1960s, in Czechoslovakia, the nude photographs made in this period were of high artistic level. The worst period of dogmatic totalitarianism came to an end with the Stalin’s death in 1953; yet, a dozen of years elapsed before clear symptoms of creative freedom became visible in Czechoslovakia. Photographers adopted a number of specialised techniques including point-source studio lighting, sandwich montages with details of various structure, projections of various rasters on the models' bodies, the Sabattier effect, coarse grain, and "rollage." Such stylized works by Miroslav Hák and Karel Ludwig were loosely emulated by other artists. In 1960, Václav Chochola made several classical studio nudes, emphasizing the models' natural beauty without distinctive stylization. In the same year, he and Jiří Kolář employed these photographs in a series of "rollages" and "prollages". Stylization through sharp light contrasts and impressive details were of ten used in nudes to emphasise basic archetypes, simple shapes and proportions. In 1960s Miloslav Stibor became one of the best known internationally Czech photographers of the nudes. In 1968 following his earlier creatively finished, technically precise but somewhat cold nudes, presented a surprising series entitled 15 Photographs for Henry Miller. The sensual photographs represent the cropped details of female bodies and are the peak of his work, if not the best works of Czech nude photography in the 1960s. Dramatic illumination of the bodies looming out of the darkness almost like phantoms represent a larger dose of naturalism rather than stylization. Sandwich montages and projections of rasters, or light-filtered patterns, were most often used in nudes by Jaroslav Vávra and Zdeněk Virt.
1970 – 2000
The illusions of freedom and socialism with human face which in 1968 were the culmination of the period of a relative political thaw of the 1960s were crushed by the Soviet tanks. The return to the communists totalitarianism after the normalising communist regime of Gustáva Husáka was set up in April 1969 was much slower and not so intense as in literature, film, or painting which were subjected to a much closer scrutiny by the guardians of ideological purity. In the beginning of 1970s it was still possible to exhibit and publish nude photographs, however as the official prudish stance began to gradually dominate, possibilities of public presentation of these works were gradually limited. Already in December 1972, the Museum of Functional Art. (Uměleckoprůmyslové museum) in Prague was forced to remove from the first retrospective exhibition of František Drtikol, prepared by Anna Fárova, some of the acts which today are praised as classical masterly creations. Nudes were soon removed from various official exhibitions, books and magazines – with the notable exception of “Revue Fotografie”, edited by Daniela Mrázkova in the period 1972–78 – to re-appear during the liberalization period under Gorbachev in the latter half of 1980. The meaningful testimony of the problems encountered by the nudity photographers of the time, especially in smaller towns, were presented in a not very successful film by Karl Kachynia “Dobre światło” [Good light], 1986.
At the same time, nudity was one of the main themes of the so-called Czech staged photography which reached its zenith in 1970s. Nude female and sometimes male figures were presented exalted scenes arranged by the members of the Berno group called “Epos”, i.e. Rostislav Košt’al, František Maršálek or Jiři Horák, who were under the strong influence of the hippie movement, literary and artistic symbolism, the echoes of surrealism and existentialism, the films of the time featuring clear picture symbols (e.g. “We eat the fruits of the Trees of Paradise” by Věra Chytilova, “Valery and the week of miracles” by Jaromil Jireš and other), and the theatre of absurd or fashion photography by William Klein, Helmut Newton, Jeanloup Sieff, or David Bailey. In the figural interior scenes and romantic open air scenes often grotesque and absurd, however always shocking, the key thing was to metaphorically and visually express the feelings of both the generation and the individual; František Maršálek so explained this point: I know very well that many of my photographs are on the border of reality and desire. Sometimes the desired is pervading, however, only to express such notions as civilisation, fear, indecision, loneliness, etc., which usually contain the largest number of desires2.
Rostislav Košt’al, in whose works the nude figures appeared most often, gradually turned towards more lyrical presentations of the nude female bodies in the picturesque landscapes; sometimes he peculiarly paraphrased elder classical pictorial models (e.g. “Uboga kraina” [The Poor Land] by Max Švabinski), on other occasions, with equal skill, he made use of the dynamics of the blurred images and motion.
František Maršálek moved from the shocking open air arrangements to exploit the fragments of nude photographs made in the workshop (the “Essay” cycle from the 1st half of the 1980s) where he innovatively used the non-traditional pictorial composition with the carefully selected light. Another member of “Epos”, Petr Sikula, only occasionally used nudity in confrontation with the impressively presented devastated industrial landscape near Ostrava.
Taras Kuščynskyj, who sought to capture female appeal in most of his work from the 1970s, was distinct from the work of the Epos group, which was oriented toward symbolic expression of generational feelings. He gradually moved from simple harmonic nudes to more dynamic arrangements with exalted gestures by the models. More and more frequently he abandoned the interiors to take pictures in the forests and fields surrounding his cottage in the Czech Heights. His best works symbolically showing the harmony between the man and nature (e.g. famous picture entitled “The Hunched”), a subtle love and fiery passion were made in co-operation with the model Dana Vašátkova. Many of them were part of the model of the book of variable artistic quality “I want” (1972-73), which was not published until 1990, i.e. seven years after the premature death of Kuščynsky. In the first half of 1970s, Taras Kuščynskyj, who was increasingly successful also in the portrait and advertising photography, reinforced his position as one of the most popular Czech photographers. He was highly praised by the public rather than critics who often accused him of superficial flashiness and excessive dependence of foreign models. The sharpest expression of the critical attitudes was given in in 1970 by Milena Lamarová: “Using the examples of posh Western magazines to which he attaches more lyrical tone, God knows why, he presents a woman as an infusion of a sweet demon after being repeatedly brewed in Samum. (...) Another hole in a pair of jeans presented in artistic way – even the most impressive breast sprinkled with water from the watering can is not going to save Wieruszki von Grajdoł from being parochial 3. In the early1980s, after a period of artistic crisis, already seriously ill Kuščynskyj created a series of suggestive, expressive photographs of the model wrapped in the white cloth who, supposedly, is an allegoric expression of the closeness of death.
In the mid-1970s many methods of the “new wave” were exhausted and in the works of Dalibor Stach, Jaroslav Novotny and other photographers they became more and more fragmented. The only exception were the works of Jan Saudek, who undoubtedly distanced himself from the subtle confrontation of the childhood with the adulthood, or juxtaposition of the dreams and reality in favour of the intensive eroticism and symbolic depictions of love, hate, and complex relationships between men and women, and the reversal of the traditional female and male roles, changes in the appearance and identify of the nude and clothed persons, the irreversible passing of time, and unavoidable old age and death. The majority of Saudeks’ photographs from the “theatre of life” were set in the underground studio in Žižkov with the permanent background of the damp walls and one window which through the photomontage were sometimes counterpointed with the scenes in the inside. The duality of the present and the timelessness of his photographs are often strengthened by juxtapositions of old costumes and decorations from other times with typical products from the end of the 20th century. A similar role to the reminiscence of old time, frequently emphased by the antedating of the photographs by a whole century, is played by hand colouring which Saudek used since 1977 and which undoubtedly contributed to the aura of hand-made originals that some of his enlargements have. In his lyrical, romantic, grotesque and exaggeratedly erotic works, Saudek brought into the Czech nude photography some new and rarely used elements. Many of his models with their round and full bodies do not fit the prevailing aesthetic criteria; Saudek is capable of finding individual beauty in each of them. In some of the photographs of Saudek as one of the first post-war Czech photographs started to present nude male bodies – his own, or his relatives and friends. It cannot be disregarded that in some cases, especially from the later period of his artistic career, Saudek drew from the reservoir of pornography and transferred certain motives into the new context which no longer surprise us in the works of Robert Mapplethorpe, Joel-Peter Witkin, Jeff Koons, or Pierre and Gilles but which is still somewhat foreign in the more domestic context. Artistic works of Saudek gained in popularity since 1970s and were propagated during the numerous exhibitions, in a number of books and on hundreds of thousands of postcards; however, the globally renowned author had to work as a worker at the printing house until 1983 when he was registered by the Czech Fine Arts Foundation. An impetuous emergence of post-modernism and the conscious exploitation of kitsch relativized the discussion of Saudek’s frequent balancing of on the border of good taste. In the 1990s, Jan Saudek, whose works were received and rejected with equal amount of enthusiasm, also due to frequent appearance on the media and an image deliberately created and maintained through exhibitions massively visited by viewers, and books printed in large quantities, became the only Czech photographer whose popularity among the society at large is comparable to that of the pop-music stars. Irrespective of his own sense of being unnoticed in his own country.
Let us come back to nude photograph of the 1970 s and 1980s. Beside the dominating position of the staged photographs of the ‘new wave’ and the related authors (such as Petr Zhoř, who often juxtaposed a naked figure with the impersonal environment or a sculpture to emphasise the atmosphere of frustration and loneliness), there appeared a number of more classically understood nude photographs. Milan Borovička, who already in the mid-1960s focused on the portraits of women with exalted faces, at the end of the following decade started to create simple, harmonious compositions depicting the details of a female body. In the carefully balanced compositions of fragments of hands and legs, back and breasts set against the black background and simplified through omission of the secondary details the intimacy of the motives and monumentality of presentation are complementary. Looking from today’s perspective, it is quite obvious that these works by using the images of minute details were strongly appealing (formal realisation coinciding with the secondary elements set against the black velvet involuntarily remind us of Ton Stan’s “The Sense”, 1992) survived the test of time much better than other portraits and nudities of Borovička where the figures of models were complemented with the peacock’s feathers, leaves, fruits and other slightly stale decorations. Borovička’s friend from the “Profile” and “Meeting” groups, i.e. Miroslav Bílek used a mixture of styles in his art. At the turn of 1960s and 1970s in his sandwich photomontages, Bílek combined the nude with the structures hard to identify, facades of the old houses, plants and landscapes. The female body became the symbol of fear, defencelessness and sense of insecurity, part of dream-like visions and objects used to express one’s own feelings. In the 1980s, Bílek re-discovered the nude and on the one side created a collection of bodies which appeal to the viewers through the presented surfaces of the bodies, optical distortion, reduced tonality, and on the other produced a cycle of subtle high key acts. Similar technique of limiting the colours to the shades of white and grey was used by Michal Tůma in the delicate cycle of carefully arranged fragments of a girl’s body entitled “She”.
Photomontage in nudities of the 1970s and 1980s was fairly popular. Besides Bílek it was used by Jan Šplíchal in the dynamic, “phased” acts containing several variations of photographs of the same model, or in the imaginary confrontation of a woman’s body with the trees or water. Lyrical, sometimes too sweet composition of the body intermingling with nature was characteristic of Jiři Škoch while in the photomontages of Martin Hruška in his cycle entitled “Disrupted observations” the fragments of various mysterious rooms helped him create an atmosphere of a nightmarish dream.
As I mentioned in connection with Jan Saudek, the male nude photographs in the Czech photography of the time appeared very rarely. In the book by Šmok “Nudity in Photography” (1969) nudes are represented with only one scary example, i.e. the kitsch arrangement “The Triumph of the Republic”. The author dismisses the issue of male nudity by stating that male body has one defect which cannot be omitted, i.e. the sexual organs which in the artistically understood nude photograph appear as a artistically not stylized distorting element. In another fragment of the book, the author resumes this topic and says: Male nudes are not forbidden, however, it also true that practically nobody makes male nudes because today the general attitude to the male body is quite different from the attitude towards the female body4.
Although we could find male nudes imitating the above-mentioned works of Saudek also in the photographs of the members of “Epos” such as Pavel Hudec-Ahasver, Petr Zhořa, Ladislav Dobromil Holan and several others, only Clifford Seidling systematically specialised in male nudes since 1960s. In his outdoor and studio nudes he emphasised the aesthetic values of the male body and did not avoid the erotic meaning. In the interview with Anna Fárova published in “Československá fotografie” in 1976 he said: Eroticism can be present, but it must not be ridiculous5.
Naked bodies of men and boys did not begin to appear in greater measure until the 1980s, in works by Slovak students at the Prague Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of Performing Asts (FAMU), Tono Stano, Vasil Stanko, Miro Švolík, Rudo Prekop, Kamil Varga and other representatives of the „second wave” of the staged photography who mostly stayed to live in Prague after graduation. With their Slovak nationality and Czech citizenship they now belong to Czech and Slovak photography. The exhibition of their works at the Prague gallery “Fotochema” in 1984, where half a dozen or so male nude photographs were presented excited the viewers. On the one hand, the female admirers of the male beauty from the “group of women from the Loun neighbourhood”, “Sylvie Doležalová” or “women from Beroun” wrote enthusiastic laudatory to the press and the exhibitors and on the other the outrage of some of the visitors was so big that the more daunting photographs presenting nude male bodies had to be removed from the exhibition.
Including naked male bodies in various shocking scenes was, of course, part of a wider revolt by the young Slovak FAMU students. Similarly to many of their generation among painters or sculptors, they rejected tendencies to moralize, typical of artists of the middle generation, and had little interest in politics or existential questions, which seemed to them to be exhausted and not modern. They found inspiration mainly in postmodernism, though often there were spontaneous reactions with a deep knowledge of the foreign artistic scene. They were not afraid of eclectic styles, subsequent interference with positives and negatives, reinterpretation of older works, humor, irony or eroticism - and in no way disguised the fact that they were often more concerned with pleasure in the creative game than with reflection of deep philosophical problems. They did not want to change the world, but they tried to relativize its perception, recognition and evaluation, to laugh at stereotypes and cliches.
The naked female and male bodies in the staged photographs of the young generation of the 1980s were not presented in an allegoric manner originating from the Art Nouveau and symbolic poetics as it was the case with the members of “Epos” or Taras Kuščynsky. The bodies they presented were more real, fleshy and bony. Tono Stano often emphasised the erotic nature of juxtaposed naked and clothed female and male models or strongly arranged scenes. Vasil Stanko in the photographs difficult to interpret verbally which involuntarily remind us of the works of the broadly understood photography of the time, arranged tableau vivant showing a group of naked bodies in empty spaces. Rudo Prekop in his works of strong artistic appeal complemented his models with various stylized props made from paper, tree branches, roots and grass leaves. The self-reflective photographs of Kamil Varga differed from the spontaneity and lightness of these works; Varga complemented his own naked body with expressive drawings of light. One of the most original and most impressive words in Czech postmodern photography was the series Playing for the Fourth from 1985-86, which resulted from collaboration by Tono Stano, Rudo Prekop and their Prague friend Michal Pacina. By joining inventive photographs of heads - made by Pacina, with photos of bodies - photographed by Prekop, and Stano's details of legs, they created not only three playful photographs, but also an unusually inventive entire serieswhich raised extraordinary interest already during the first exhibition at the Prage “Foma”. Looking at the „ Playing for the Fourth” from today’s perspective they can be regarded as a peak of the new wave of the staged photography beside the light „tableau vivant” by Švolika, taken from the bird’s view perspective. The staged photography after an earlier domination of the photographic document pervaded the works of the Czech photographers of the latter half of the 1980s. Although rightly associated with the extremely active group of the then Slovak students of FAMU, a number of similar works, however, without the so clear lightness and ease of reception, can be found in the creative productions of the Czech photographers such as Gabina Fárová who in the Prague cycle created a mystery arrangement of the naked and clothed figures in the empty scenery of the city at night where the unusual character of the event was additionally strengthened by the combination of the lights and their reflections. The nude mainly male bodies were also used in the introspective staged photographs of Stanislav Friedlaender and Martin Vybíral or in the typically post-modernistic arrangements of Ivan Pinkava in the cycle “Whether good or bad” and “Heaven, Hell and Paradise”. Also in some works of Pavel Baňka from the latter half of the 1980s, we will find a certain degree of response to the amusingly staged photographs of the Slovak students of FAMU, however Baňka’s preferred domain of interests was the sophisticated, elegant nudes and portraits originating from the glamorous tradition and often produced on the large size Polaroid materials. Some of the best works were created in the cooperation with the sculptor and jeweller Vratislav Karel Novák whose jewels were inventively photographed by Baňka with the camera placed directly on the bodies and faces of the models; he used the images many times as an important pictorial and content element.
Numerous, shocking at first features of this wave of photography, became more commonplace in the beginning of the 1990 when it became apparent that this trend is past its zenith. While some of its representatives were only mechanically producing the newer versions of the older photographs, remaining outside the current trends of the contemporary art Ton Stan managed to move towards simple and more elegant nudes emphasising clear shapes, healthy sensuality and often enough carefully thought over work with light and shade somehow alluding to the works of Drtikol. The refined picture entitled “The Sense” of 1992 raise international fame and its less successful version appeared on the posters of the American film „Showgirls”. The commercial success of these nude photographs also contributed to the fact that today Tono Stano beside Jan Saudek and Michal Macků is regarded as one of the few Czech photographers who earns his living only from his artistic work.
One of the clear trends of the 1980s were the inter-media works where the nudity was one of the frequent themes. The post-modernistic redefinition of the purity of the photographic picture, retrospect for dozens of years since the time of Peter Henry Emerson and Alfred Stieglitz also in Czechoslovkia led to the more and more frequent crossing of the borders between photography, painting, graphics and sculpture. Pavel Jasanský reacted to the expressionist impulses from works by Arnulf Reiner and Anselm Kiefer in the series Bodies, growing since 1985. The large size photographs of the naked pairs and groups which initially were composed in the cooperation with the painter and sculptor Jiří Sozanský were supplemented with the momentous tones of black; he connected then in an action sequence or assembled a video film. Vladimír Židlický shifted from abstract body fragments with frequent use of luminography to dramatic scenes with clusters of naked figures, creatively reinforced by engraving and scratching negatives, drawing with light and brown toning of the enlargements in brown. Similar in nature were some of the photographs and themes of nudes by Jiři Korecki. Kateřina Scheuflerová once enriched her male nudes with pictorial elements and since 1987 as unquestionably one of the first in our country used computer to develop and process the pictures. Sculptoress Nadja Rawová made photographs of naked figures in almost natural sizes shot by Michal Pacina; they remind of rich reliefs similar in spirit and nature to the works of the Polish artist Izabela Gustowska.
From the beginning of the 1990s, the fall of the communist regime and the return of democracy brought an exceptionally liberal atmosphere for the photographic nude in Czechoslovakia, which seemed to want to quickly compensate for the long years of censorship and official prudishness. Dozens of erotic and pornographic magazines appeared, which here, unlike most western European countries or the USA are not sold only in special sex-shops, but in virtually all news agents. Blending of the criteria applicable to the erotic photography and artistic nudity were mixed. Ordinary soft-porno productions of the hyper-kitschman working in exile Jerry Pasternak were exhibited at the photographic festival in Zdra on the Sazava as extraordinary renowned works published with the laudatory articles being published in the popular and professional magazines. Jadran Šetlik, deft with the media but totally devoid of any invention author of mawkish, colourful nude photographs, whose name as far as I know was never mentioned in any foreign photograph encyclopaedia is generally referred to by some of the papers ss the best known internationally Czech photographer; the horrific kitsch produced by Zlatuše and Rostislav duet somehow managed to permeate into the gallery of the French Institute in Prague, which traditionally hosted the exhibitions of works of Henrio Cartier-Bresson, Helmut Newton, or Frank Horvat.
Despite these excesses, the closing 1990s were an exceptionally fertile period for Czech nude photography. While the staged photography of the previous decade was dominated by a return to playfulness and the lack of conflict of Dada or poetism, in newer staged photographs by Ivan Pinkava, Václav Jirásek or Michal Macků we find quite different influences. Ivan Pinkava frequently seeks inspiration in antiquity, the Gothic, the Renaissance, Mannerism, the Baroque, decadence or symbolism of the last century. Pinkava’s photographs are devoid of lightness, fun or humour present in the majority of works of his contemporaries; the expressiveness of his works consists in the existential content and philosophical depth. His models whose exalted facial expression is emphasized by the gaudy make-up in vast majority are sex-less looking young men and elderly women; however, his more recent Works, such as the fascinating paraphrase of the famous picture John the Baptist by Leonardo da Vinci represent on exceptional basis also young women with poorly accentuated features of both genders. Despite the fact that many models in the Pinkava’s studio are presented without any clothes, nudity as such is not his main focus. Nudity only provides information on a concrete time and helps to discover the secrets of the soul concealed in the photographed bodies; the revelations is sometimes possible through the destruction of the bodies. The people in Pinkava's photographs frequently look like archetypes or mythical figures, who symbolize various psychological, relational or sexual themes, just as the desire to seek something deeper and more permanent than the current hectic times usually provide. Pinkava’s works whose external form is increasingly simplified and the content difficult to express in words are deeper and more complex; the photographs become not only the visual metaphors of general themes but also, to a certain degree a mirror of individual feelings and experiences of the author.
At the beginning of the group Brotherhood (Bratrstvo) at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, Václav Jirásek used as starting points the archetypes of the most dogmatic period of socialist realism, but today, like Pinkava, he seeks inspiration in a far more distant past, reaching not only to symbolism or the Gothic, but even to pre-historic myths. His photographs full of melancholic tones representing a lonely male model against the setting of a romantic landscape, explore the abysses of time, unchanging values, and supra-individual order and faith. They return on a kind of imaginary spiral to the spiritual atmosphere of the end of the 19th century, which had great interest in such themes. All this is underlined by the richness of his tonal scale and the sharpness of contact copies from large format negatives, from which he sometimes assembles long panoramic images.
An accent on content and image symbols is also typical for the works of Michal Macků, which have recently received great acclaim in the United States and some European countries. Macků very inventively uses the technique of "gellages," which permits pulling the damp emulsion from a large-format negative and then treating it, which can include multiplication of the same motif, tearing, suppressing certain details or spatial distortions. In motifs of his own naked body in imaginary space he symbolizes the themes of violence, anxiety, loss of individuality in the middle of a de-personalized crowd, the duality of body and soul, transcendence and extra-rational perception. His older gelleages in their expressiveness, aggression and exaltation are close to the works of Francis Bacon; in the Czech photography they best document the withdrawal of some of the artists of the 1990s from the post-modernistic disinclination towards argument. The latest works representing quite conventional female nude photographs or the complex astrological symbols incomprehensive for the broader audience do not have the same power as the earlier works of the author.
Zdeněk Lhoták also photographs his own nude body, but his work is markedly different from the photographs of Michal Macků and the works by John Coplans with similar motifs. Fragments of the naked figure are depicted from such unexpected angles and in such surprising cut outs, that they become a kind of sign, in which the erotic charge is suppressed in order to emphasize self-reflection and complicated symbolism, loosely inspired by yoga and Buddhism. A novelty in Lhoták's nude self-portraits, is the use of color.
In the '90s Pavel Mára made two distinctive series with motifs of naked bodies. In the technically precisely made, greater than life size enlargements of triptychs, depicting faces and entire naked figures of women and men from a frog's-eye view, axial view, and bird's eye view with parallel vertical lines, he suggestively posed the questions of identity, outer appearance and the precision of our perception. The tranquility of these photographs contrasts with the expressiveness of the red androgynous bodies from the series Mechanical Corpuses, connecting in an unusual symbiosis sensuality and coldness, animality and de-personalization.
who work inventively in nude photography with psychological and esthetic aspects of color is Jiří David - one of the best known artists of the middle generation, who often uses photography in his work. The sharply colored photos of his own naked young son with a revolver (it is difficult to predict the response society at in the USA who try to find the features of child pornography even in the lyrical photographs of the naked children made by Sally Mann) remind the viewers of the unusual atmosphere of David Lynch’s films. More irony and sarcasm can be found in the works of another well known Czech artist Václav Stratil and his provocative cycle “Masterly works”. There are more nudes and photographs presenting naked bodies made by the painters and sculptors as the photography begins to play an increasingly import ant role in arts.
In the early days of photography female photographers appeared only as an exception; in the interwar period it was Gertruda Fischerová-Rösslerová, and in the period from 1960 until 1980 Věra Váchová-Šmoková with her artistically stylized details of female bodies and individual child and youth nudity and, to a lesser degree, Marie Šechtlová and Olga Michalková who also marked their presence in the art photography. In recent years a number of female photographs of male and female nudes have appeared. Even during her studies at FAMU Michaela Brachtlová drew attention with her juxtapositions of details of bodies and plants, sea creatures and furs, in which, on the surrealist model, she emphasized latent erotic meanings. She also drew loosely on her somewhat grotesque-seeming juxtapositions of male bodies with fetishist furs in the illusory details of the male models' bodies. Veronika Bromová, today one of the most popular protagonists of the Czech artistic scene is a member of the growing circle of painters and sculptors experimenting with photography. After a series of impressive nudities and portraits where she included illusive fragments of old anatomic atlases and self-nudities from the collection entitled “I” (1998), she also took interest in photographing her own body covered with an adhesive tape. These photographs showing an uncommon use of the sadist and masochistic elements were part of the “Zemzoo” installation which represented the Czech art on the recent Biennale in Venice. In the stylistics of documentary alluding to individual “Nude Portraits” by Ján Reč of the 1980s, Irena Armutidisová and Jolana Havelková created their own sociologically and psychologically expressive portraits of naked men and women. Women photographers, painters and sculptors experimenting with photography and presenting nude bodies or details of the nude bodies are increasing in number; Markéta Othová, Milena Dopitová, Helena Márová, Michaela Thelenová, Hana Sklenková, Vitězslava Ivičičová, Katarina Hanová, Markéta Adamcová, Jitka Lhotská and many other should be mentioned here. It does not only prove women’s emancipation; it also confirms that fact that nude photographs are one of the most popular, favourite and topical genres of the modern Czech photography which is the main theme of our exhibition.