A publisher, educator, historian and curator, Vladimír Birgus is a devoted photographer of the subjective moment. Since the early 1970s he has been capturing people and places in compositions that treat color and tone rigorously but never foreclose on the reading of the image. Something Unspeakable follows him through different cities and everyday encounters, moods, hidden desires and emotions.
"Czech Photography of the 20th Century, published simultaneously in Czech and English versions, is the first book to present the main trends, figures, and works of Czech photography from the beginning to the end of the last century to such a large extent. Its 517 plates include not only the most important, well-known photographs and photomontages, but also works that have long been forgotten or are published for the first time. The book is arranged in seventeen chapters, supplemented with chronologies of the most important events in twentieth-century Czech photography and history." --Publisher's website.
"Although the book covers many aspects of Drtikol's career and life-work, it is mainly devoted to his photographs. 120 duotone and 8 colour full-page reproductions of Drtikol's works from the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague and a number of other public and private collections illustrate representative selections from all his creative periods, with an emphasis on Drtikol's masterly nudes from the second half of the 1920s, when he moved gradually from his beginnings in pictorialism and symbolism to react in his highly individual way to current avant-garde trends. The text, supplemented with almost fifty other reproductions, analyzes and characterizes Drtikol's photographs and locates them in the wider spiritual and artistic context of their time with the help of quotations from Drtikol's notes and correspondence. The monograph also contains a complete exhibition history, bibliographic listing, and a number of little known works, some never before published."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Drawn from a broad range of photography, from works by famed photographers to anonymous images, Once Upon a Time in the East offers a portrait of Czechoslovakia across the 20th century, registering its dramatic changes of regime as well as more intimate scenes of daily life. Communist demonstrations and festivals are documented alongside domestic scenes in pubs and cottages. Among the historic moments recorded in this volume are the blasting of the Stalin monument in Prague in 1962 (taken by an unknown photographer); Milon Novotny's photographs of the funeral parade of Jan Palach in 1969; and an incredible series of surveillance photographs taken by an unidentified member of the Czech secret police, which furtively documents equally furtive assignations on the streets of Prague. Works by Ivo Gil, Josef Koudelka, Jindrich Streit, Miroslav Tichy, Jiri Toman and many others are also included.
