Torst – serie

Published together for the first time are the photographs taken by the Czech photographer Zden Tmej during the years 1942-1944 in Breslau, Prussia, where he and others were taken to perform forced labor for the Nazis. Easily the most important and extensive visual documentation of the forced labor camps, these photos have both artistic and historical value.

Ethnographer, sociologist, art historian and photographer, Eva Davidova is one of the founders of Gypsy (Roma) studies in the Czech Republic and has been illuminating and investigating this secretive society for half a century. Davidova took her first photographs of Slovak and Olah Gypsy (formerly nomadic Romani) communities and made the first audio recordings of Gypsy stories and music in the 1950s. The collected photographs in the present volume, made between 1956 and 1995, constitute an unparalleled social and artistic document of everyday Gypsy life and the roads the Gypsies have traveled over this past half century. Anna Farova, a leading historian of Czech photography, and Jana Horvathova, Director of the Museum of Romani Culture in Brno, provide essays.

The oeuvre of the leading Czech avant-garde photographer Eugen Wiskovsky (1888-1964) is not large in size or subject range, but it is noteworthy in its originality, depth of ideas, and mastery. Wiskovsky's early New Objectivist works, from the late 1920s and early 1930s, sought artistic effect in apparently nonaesthetic objects: His inventive lighting and cropping allowed their elementary lines to stand out, to lose their worldly associations and take on potential metaphorical meanings. In his dynamic diagonal compositions, Wiskovsky was among the most radical practitioners of Czech Constructivism. His landscape work is similarly distinctive. With text from Vladim'r Birgus, a historian of photography and the head of the Institute of Creative Photography at Silesian University, Opava, in the Czech Republic.

This survey of Iren Stehli's images from 1973 to 2001 captures Czech life over an intense three decades. The artist, born in Zurich in 1953, studied photography in Prague in the mid-70s. In the late 60s, her adopted country had begun to stir under the hand of communism--and been punished for it. By the middle of her career, in 1989, the embattled communist government resigned, passing power to playwright Vaclav Havel in the Velvet Revolution. The swift changes that followed have brought what is now the Czech Republic into the European Union. Stehli's human stories of that era alternate with conceptual series, both of which share a characteristic poetry and humor. The thematically arranged chapters of Iren Stehli offer a compact overview of her oeuvre, and subtle, compelling testimony to the last decades of Czechoslovakian socialism and the transformation into a free-market democracy. Her previous book is Libuna: A Gypsy's Life in Prague.

Though he is best known for his Art Nouveau and Art Deco nudes, when Frantisek Drtikol (1883-1961) passed way, he left more portrait photography than anything else--thousands of images made between 1910 and the 1930s. This ambitious book is the first ever devoted to those portraits alone. The selection, culled from some 2,000 in Prague's National Archive, presents a gallery of eminent Czechs and Slovaks during the first Czechoslovak Republic, as well as prominent visitors to the country from many walks of life. Apart from their pure documentary value, these images reflect Drtikol's efforts to capture his sitters' inner selves, bridging idealism and materialism. The artist has also been the subject of The Photographer Frantisek Drtikol and Photographs by Frantisek Drtikol; this volume is compiled and written by Josef Moucha.

After the Second World War, Czech avant-garde photographer Eva Fuková and her first husband, Vladimir Fuka, were close to the artists of Skupina 42. In 1967, they emigrated to the United States, where Eva Fuková has continued to make work that renders the familiar strange by blending absurdity with raw inspiration.

Born in 1944, Prague photographer Jindrich Pribik makes supremely complicated work. Over more than 50 years, he has created 40 overlapping series, an intricate web of mutual references and quotations. Many of the works include written essays, reflections in glass windows, found negatives, literary motifs and other montage elements.

Born in 1942, Prague photographer Jan Reich carries on the work of Josef Sudek. He began with still lifes, portraits and documentary photographs, then switched to rural and urban landscapes in the 70s. Working with old, large-format cameras--one of which was given to him by Sudek--he documents the rocky land around Sedlcany.

Working in black and white, Ivan Pinkava (born 1961) casts his subjects as contemporary incarnations of classical and Biblical persons: Narcissus, Sebastian, Salome, Cain and Abel. He has extended this idea to create imaginary portraits of writers who have gained iconic stature, such as Vladimir Mayakovsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Sylvia Plath.

The Czech photojournalist Jindrich Marco (1921–2000) is best known for his World War II photographs, which, rather than depicting killing fields, captured the ordinary citizens of war-torn cities like Berlin, Dresden and Warsaw returning home and attempting to pick up the pieces. This monograph includes these and later series made throughout Europe in happier times.

Czech artist Jan Svoboda (1934–1990) spent a lifetime laboring to redefine the language of photography. This catalogue gives an overview of his career, from early still lifes to works that questioned the rules and boundaries of the photographic image to his pioneering conceptual photographs of the late 1960s--pictures that frequently quoted from other works of his.

Born in 1907, Alexandr Hackenschmied is one of the founders of modern Czech photography and film. He is better known here as Sasha Hammid, the name he took upon becoming a United States citizen in 1947, having fled Nazi persecution in his native Czechoslovakia in 1939. Since then he and his wife, Maya Deren, have played a key role in American avant-garde film. Both by himself and in collaboration with other artists, Hackenschmied made a number of important documentaries--including the 1964 film To Be Alive!, made with Francis Thompson, which was awarded an Oscar for Best Documentary in 1967. His photographic work, though less well known here, is equally worthy of praise. In it we see his dynamic conception of space--honed with years of experience as a cameraman and editor--and the combination of formal perfection with deep emotional resonance, the meeting of the artist's mind with the mind of the audience.

Moving between art photography, documentary and straightforward reporting, Václav Chochola has found many of his motifs on the outskirts of Prague, where he was born. Inspired by Surrealism, Skupina 42, urban life, and post-war Existentialism, he is best known for his seminal 1960s nudes and his personality-driven portraits.

Though Alfons Mucha, known as Alphonse Mucha, (1860-1939) achieved lasting international acclaim as an Art Nouveau painter, graphic designer and decorator, his photography is not as well known. In this new, expanded edition produced in cooperation with the Mucha Trust, an intimate and accomplished photographer is revealed. A kind of sketchbook and personal visual diary, this record of captured moments from the mid-1880s until the end of the artist's life illuminates both Mucha's career as an artist and the time in which he lived. In addition, the behind-the-scenes glimpses of his studio prove that Mucha--a key creator of the ideal of Art Nouveau beauty--was one of the pioneers of the classic nude in Czech photography. For lay readers and photographic connoisseurs alike, this volume illuminates a unique and powerful artistic vision.

The work of the legendary late photographer and samizdat publisher Bohumil "Bob" Krcil, who was born in 1952, is little known in his native country. He left Czechoslovakia in 1969, and for the next 23 years, traveled extensively through much of Europe and Asia, photographing what he encountered. He had a knack for being in the right place at the right time: He captured the Afghan city of Herat before the Soviet invasion, the hashish culture of the Indian part of the Himalayas and New York, where he eventually settled on the Lower East Side, in the 1980s, in a straightforward, documentary style. Of his New York work, The Prague Post wrote, "Like his work from other points across the globe, the photos of New York mostly capture people on the streets or in shops, all of whom seem to radiate the special energy of the city. Even his cityscapes without people are full of life. The best photo from this series is "The Twins in the Wind" (1983), showing the towers of the World Trade Center rising above a mound of earth and utterly isolated against the sky, almost as if they were alone in a desert, touching the clouds." Like his prominent friends, photographers Josef Koudelka and Antonín Kratochvíl, Krcil lived and worked in exile. He is remembered for his innate openness, tolerance and amiability--traits that made him a natural traveler. This publication includes an essay by Jitka Hlavackova, an art historian at Prague City Gallery.