Czech Photography & Goldin: Earlier this week I visited two exhibitions in London which I think are worth seeing if you can. The first was one part of a three part show organised by the Czech Embassy, Pixels and Poetics: Sudek, Funke, and the Influence of New Technologies on the Development of Photography, and featured some classic works by Josef Sudek and Jaromír Funke.
[I’ve decided not to include photographs in this post – the links will provide plenty and there are far more on line. But the best way to see most photographs is not on-line but in books which are now readily available for the photographers I mention.]
I think I first really came across Josef Sudek (1896-1976) when Creative Camera magazine published a few of his pictures in 1973 and 1975 and it was from their Doughty Street bookshop that I bought the first monograph published outside his native country in 1978, Sudek by Sonja Bullaty, a substantial volume and finely printed in gravure. Some years later, Sonja Bullaty, the most prestigious of photography magazines, devoted two of its quarterly issues to him and I also managed to buy a fine book of his work published in Czechoslovakia – one of around 16 published in his lifetime.
Czechoslavakia only became an independent country at the end of the First World War in 1918, and from 1948-89 was under communist control. Sudek’s photographs during that time had to be smuggled out of the country by his friends, and some were shown in the USA in the late 1960s, with a retrospective at George Eastman House in 1974.
Conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1915, he was wounded and his right arm amputated. He studied photography in Prague with Karel Novák from 1922 to 1924, and his army pension and a small inheritance helped him build a career in photography. He always worked with large format cameras, sometimes with an assistant – Sonja Bullaty before she left for New York in 1947. These large cameras and his disability meant he had to work slowly and methodically which suited his style of work.
Most of his photographs were made in the city of Prague, but many inside his own studio, and he was a master of the still-life, using familiar household items – a glass of water, a loaf of bread, and egg… and controlled natural lighting.
His work is very different to mine, but I found Sudek’s panoramic images of particular interest. As Tim Parkin states in a detailed account of his life in On Landscape magazine, it was “in 1948 that a major piece slotted into place for Sudek. Two friends gave him a panoramic camera, more specifically a Kodak No. 4 Panoram. This camera took 3:1 ratio film at 12” by 4” and used a sweep lens that covered almost 120 degrees.” It was for Sudek a new way of seeing the world, and it was one that appealed to me, and led to me spending more than I could really afford – around a month’s salary – on a rather smaller Japanese swing-lens camera which had a similar angle of view, though was rather easier to use and worked with much cheaper 35mm film, though giving a much wider vertical view.
Jaromír Funke (1986 – 1945) was a very different photographer, but the two of them became friends as members of a camera club when Sudek first came into photography. They both for different reasons had strong disagreements with the more established club members over photography and were thrown out so founded their own club. This too had some resonance with me and my own experiences when with Terry King, Derek Ridgers and some other friends we formed Framework – and which I wrote about here ten years ago in the post Punk London 1977.
Funke was ten years older than Sudek but a modernist, part of a movement that was exploring new ways with photographic images across much of Europe, with photographers including Man Ray in Paris, László Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus, Christian Schad, Alexander Rodchenko in Russia and others – often working without cameras. Geometry played an important part in their work, both in using unusual angles of view and in choosing subject matter, while Sudek’s work was more lyrical.
The show in the Bouda Gallery, at the Czech Centre London is a small one, but with fine works by both photographers. Sudek’s images in high quality pigment inkjet prints are superb, with great separation of the darker tones, truly luxurious, while Funke’s are more workmanlike, more concerned with ideas than the quality of their expression. It is part of a larger show, with some works on the street outside the embassy which didn’t particularly speak to me and others in the Vitrínka Gallery in Kensington Palace Gardens which I didn’t visit. But I did walk the length of Kensington Palace Gardens, a private street lined with embassies and other fine buildings, but unfortunately a street where photography is banned.
I won’t write much about the second show I visited. Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is at Gagosian in Davies Street until March 21 and has already been widely covered. It is described as “an exhibition of all 126 photographs from Nan Goldin’s genre-defining photobook The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” and there are actually more than those 126 pictures on show. The ‘Ballad’ has had a number of different manifestations over its life, beginning as slide presentations with playlists in New York clubs and has also been made into a film. I wrote about it around 20 years ago in an article no longer on-line which perhaps I’ll one day search out and republish.
Having seen the Ballad in several formulations I found this perhaps the least interesting and impressive. Presented in 4 horizontal rows it was hard to see any real sequence and there are no captions. Of course the slide shows had no captions, but did have accompanying music – and contained many more images, I think over 700 in some cases.
But both in the slide shows and the book, the images come at you one – or two as slides fade into each other – at a time, and with captions in the book.) Perhaps this show would have pleased me more it it were laid out in a single line along a very long corridor or around the walls of a larger space. That top line was too high and that bottom line too low and made it impossible to get close enough to the work to concentrate on a single image. I went home and pulled that 1986 book (republished many times later) off my shelf, sat in a comfortable chair and enjoyed it much more.
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