accompanying events
New Life, New Document
Czech Republic: Kateřina Držková – Barbora Kleinhamplová, Libor Fojtík, Hana Jakrlová, Svatopluk Klesnil, Jakub Skokan a Martin Tůma, Jan Vaca; Hungary: Krisztina Erdei, Matyás Misetics, Péter Szabó Pettendi, Slovakia: Andrej Balco, Šymon Kliman, Martin Kollár, Jozef Ondzik
Exhibition “New Life, New Document” focuses on wide, but still not precisely definable zone of new document in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia. Significant changes in the lives of majority of people living in the Central European region are examined by the authors of various new trends of documentary photography, distant from the traditional positions of humanistic photo reportage, or subjectively orientated snapshot photography. The exhibition was originally prepared for Prague Bienalle Photo 1 and included also the work of Polish photographers. However, they had been exhibited in Warsaw before, and therefore, due lack of space, their work is not presented at 6th Warsaw Festival of Art Photography.
All of the Central European countries may recognize the long tradition of documentary photography as well as a number of important artists working in this field. However, while in the Czech lands and Hungary had held document a strong position in the 70th and 80th, in Slovakia it was at that time somewhat in the shadow of intermedia works, conceptual, staged and art photography and it came up into the attention of especially young artists in the later decade. At that time,the approaches of "new document," presented in larger sets of content and images with a fixed concept, clearly began to branch off from more or less traditionally perceived positions of documentary photography. Formally, an interest in creative applications and possibilities of color photographs (black and white images are rare), a combination of flash lights with existing lighting and color filters, an emphasis on excellent technical processing of large-format prints, often adjusted and without traditional mounts and frames, are characteristic for new document. Below this, at first sight an obvious technical innovation, even more pronounced shift in attitudes towards the photographed person is present. Unlike earlier photo coverage, sociological analysis, or humanistic celebration, the elements of irony and sarcasm frequently appear. The photographer's intentions relating to the reality and shifted on a large scale, from the emphasis on subjectivity and the author’s position, found in various forms of self reflexive visual diaries, to non-participating descriptiveness and conscious elimination of the photographer between the camera and photographed motif are also new. Change in values and lifestyle after the fall of communism, the growing commercialisation and hedonism and weakening religiosity, the actual impact of the global world into the lives of people in Central Europe are frequently observed, as this environment is gradually attacked by Western trends, infiltrated by the media and advertising strategies. Frequent in Western European or American photography, but in Central Europe still not so explored, is the issue of new middle class with its specific system of values and in many cases not yet accommodated lifestyle imitating foreign idols. There are often themes coming into the spotlight, which were tabooed or suppressed over the period of communist totalitarianism: prostitution, drugs, sex, crime.
Hana Jakrlová responded in her series Big Sister to the massive emergence of paid sexual services and pornographic industry in the post-communist countries of Central Europe. She made the long-term monitoring of Internet brothel in Prague, unusual with its special system of payment and bringing personal intimacy into the public. Sex is provided free of charge, but under the agreement that visitor will be recorded by ubiquitous cameras, which form distinctive household accessories and “live” or later can be watched by anyone with prepaid access to the web site.
Many contemporary Czech, Hungarian and Slovak photographers do not hesitate to combine documentary and staged photography the way such photographers like Jeff Wall, Tina Barney and Philip-Lorca diCorcia did. They are not concerned with the indefatigability of authenticity yet, but rather with a visually attractive represence of the substance of observed problems. This stylization of reality draws our attention to the fact that photography is just a picture, coded communication, stories. Moreover, the stylization is unthinkable without the reality. This para-documentary approach can draw inspiration from a wide range of sources, from the conventions of fashion photography to the principles of "archaeological" extraction of family albums. Jan Vaca as a journalist in the Czech daily Mladá fronta Dnes writes about criminal and court cases, criminal and violent acts. Undoubtedly inspired by this background, he created arranged images full of deliberate compositional and technical errors suggesting the style of amateur snapshots in response to contemporary Internet phenomenon of "stalking", voyeristic snooping and observing of intimate moments of strangers. Composition and the principles usual for advertising and fashion photography can be found in a grotesque project of Kateřina Držková and Barbora Kleinhamplová, who as if under the influence of captivating reading of lifestyle magazines captured the everyday family life of ordinary, middle-classed people inside the living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens and bathrooms sold in the shopping center Ikea. Only after a closer inspection we can discover that the daily routines scenes take place in the showrooms of the Prague branch of Swedish company, while the individual pieces of furniture are still marked by the price tags and bar codes. Two other authors, Jakub Skokan and Martin Tüma create fictional, unbelievable versions of situations that might happen in reality. They design the scenes with the help of volunteers. Matyás Misetics, an artist successful in the fields of freelance and advertising photography, created the night city scenes somewhere between reality and dream, ghostlike look accented by imaginative lightening. As if he created a general stage for potential further action, the one which all players are awaiting.
Martin Kollár tries to capture important moments during the official ceremonies clerks who stand stiff during wedding ceremonies.The interiors of the offices are still styled in a 1970s design fashion and the artists tries to find the formal beauty of those rooms. Andrej Balco makes portraits of Ukrainian workers in Slovakia. He photographs them in their daily environment, in bleak carriage compartments, cloak-rooms or in cheap hostels, trying to capture theirr will of surviving. Symon Kliman, another author from Slovakia, uses the stylistics of fashion photograpy for the project „Roma”. The image of Romani people in the works of Kliman is different than the one preesnted by the media. He shows them in the way they would like to be seen.
Sociologist and photographer Péter Szabó Pettendi drove the remote corners of Hungary with a huge billboard of lighted Budapest the portrait the local people who have never visited the Hungarian capital, although they often live just a few kilometers away. The result of this "sociological survey" are arranged portraits with the direct looks of portraited, which was documented via photography, as well as video.
Still photographs displaying various buildings, urban environment and landscape are another accounts of current lifestyle.
Photographs that presents buildings, city landscape and city environmentrelate to the current style of living.
Libor Fojcik creates ironic images that show the absurdities of the contemporary life in Prague. Jozef Ondzik, a general practitioner from Slovakia, follows the signs of the Wester life entering Slovakia after 1989. Svetoplek Klesnil in an ironic way, using hard light and bright colors, presents scens of worshipping cattle by their owners in Převově or in Paris.
Krisztina Erdei puts in her longtime project Plastic freely side by side static fragments of various objects and snapshots that are connected via shared sense of the oddly artificial and alienated world. Significant color photographs are full of metaphorical ghostlikeness.
Exhibition New Life,New document shows in the selected examples only a fraction of contemporary tendencies in Czech, Hungarian and Slovak documentary photography made by the authors of younger generation. We believe, that it is possible to pursue the diverse authorial reflection of radical lifestyle changes in those countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall and undermining of banks of traditionally understood document.
Vladimír Birgus and Tomáš Pospěch