Search results for ""torst""

Leading Czech photographer and photojournalist Tomki Nemec was one of Václav Havel''s personal photographers in the 90s. Winner of two World Press Photo awards, his work has been published in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, The New York Times and Time Magazine. This volume collects his black-and-white documentary photographs of ordinary people throughout the world.

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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 ri

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Despite a career that was curtailed at the age of 29, Vladimír Jindrich Bufka (18871916) was one of the most distinctive early-twentieth-century art photographers in Prague and indeed in all of Austria-Hungary. Bufka drew on contemporary artistic movements such Impressionism, Symbolism and Cubism for his pioneering prints using the demanding process of gum printing.

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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.

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Czech artist Jan Svoboda (19341990) 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.

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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.

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Josef Sudek (1896–1976) was Prague’s Atget. From the mid-1920s until his death in 1976, Sudek photographed everything—the Gothic and Baroque architecture, the streets and objects—usually leaving the frame free of people. Because he was reclusive, a large portion of Sudek’s work was captured through his studio window: he was particularly fond of how the glass refracted light. The Window of My Studio series, spanning from the beginning of the Second World War to the first half of the 1950s, presents the series, which was of fundamental importance to Sudek, for it caused his work to move further into a surreal or Magic Realist style, with blurred images and strong shadows. Photography historian Anna Fárová contributes an introduction and an extensive biographical chronology to this volume—now back in print—which also includes a complete bibliography of portfolios, books and catalogues of Sudek’s work.

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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.

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The Czech photojournalist Jindrich Marco (19212000) 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.

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Surveying the ubiquitous work of the famed Czech graphic design studioThe Czech graphic design studio Najbrt has carved out an extraordinary spot in its home market: total ubiquity. Founder and principal Ales Najbrt designs books (Czech100 Design Icons), magazines (Raut), dinner plates (with abstract calligraphic motifs), sporting equipment (LTB''s camouflage snowboard), clothes (racing stripe hat, scarf and satin boxers) and posters (including one for his own work). Featuring 1,280 color images, this collection of Najbrt and his compatriots'' lively, bright and colorful work pulls together a wide range of corporate commissions, book designs, exhibition projects and other innovative work. It is introduced by the pioneering design critic Rick Poynor, and features a profile of Studio Najbrt by the designer and design journalist Alan Zaruba, editor of the volume, and an interview with Ales Najbrt himself. An instant collector''s item, it is designed w

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Moravian photographer Vojta Dukát (born 1947) went into exile in the Netherlands after Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Soviet Army in 1968. This monograph displays his intimate, black-and-white images of people conducting mundane, ritualistic tasks.

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A member of the 1980s Slovak New Wave generation of photographers trained under Ján mok, Peter Zupník (born 1961) searches out hidden poetry in everyday objects, by means of close-ups, short depth of field and additional painting. Zupník''s series Little Big Things is perhaps the best-known example of his approach, of which he was virtually a pioneer in Czechoslovakia.

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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.

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Jan Ságl, born in Humpolec, Bohemia, in 1942, is a pioneer of color photography in the Czech Republic. He is known for his photographs of landscapes and inconspicuous corners of cultural metropolises, as well as the design work he did for psychedelic concerts with his wife, the artist Zorka Ságlová.

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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.

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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.

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On top of his day job--he was co-owner of a tannery in the Bohemian-Moravian Uplands of Czechoslovakia--Josef Binko (1879-1960) made time to create one of the most important photography portfolios of his era. He is the only amateur photographer with thousands of negatives in Prague's Museum of Decorative Arts, the country's most serious photography collection, and the only Czech photographer continuously represented at the National Technical Museum, Prague: his darkroom is part of a permanent exhibition on the history of photographic technology. He is one of only two Czech photographers whose brome oil and gum bichromate prints from the period before the First World War are known to have survived in the hundreds. Binko, until recently little known, has now come to be understood as a major contributor to the early years of his media.

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