Eduard Palíšek

Bohemica – Faces of Our Country What does it actually mean to portray a country? To photograph its landscape, its cities, its events, or the people who live there? The project Bohemica – Faces of Our Country seeks the answer precisely in human faces. It does not, however, attempt to create a representative gallery of prominent Czechs, nor does it seek to construct an image of society according to a predetermined scheme. Instead, it emerges as a collection of encounters with people both known and unknown, with personalities who have entered the public sphere as well as those whose stories remain outside it. Thus, Zdeněk Svěrák, Tomáš Hanák, Antonín Kratochvíl, David Černý, Michael Kocáb, Terezie Kovalová, Václav Marhoul, Ivan Klíma, Eva Zažímalová, Jiří Pavel Kafka, Robert Vano, Vladimír Birgus, Jindřich Štreit, Miroslav Bárta and others appear side by side, as do members of the 400 ASA photography collective, alongside young girls whom the photographer encountered on Wenceslas Square and Na Příkopě Street and who became part of his Emo Riot series. It is precisely this juxtaposition that is essential to the project. The exhibition does not divide its subjects according to social status, age, profession, or degree of public recognition. In front of the camera, these distinctions become, for a moment, secondary. A well-known public figure has no greater claim to an image than an anonymous girl from the street. Every portrait is the result of a specific encounter between two people – the person portrayed and the photographer. The title Bohemica refers to the Czech context, though not in a narrowly ethnographic sense. It is not an attempt to identify a typical “Czech face”. Quite the opposite. The collection demonstrates just how difficult such a thing would be to define at all. In these photographs, Czech society is composed of individuality, experience, memory, defiance, humour, doubt and self-confidence. It is embodied by someone who has lived through almost an entire century just as much as by a young girl who is only beginning to shape her identity. Time, in fact, is one of the exhibition’s subtle recurring themes. Jiří Pavel Kafka, a member of a generation marked by war, stands at one end of an imaginary timeline; the girls from the Emo Riot series stand at the other. Between them stretch several generations of Czech culture, science and public life. Writers, musicians, visual artists, filmmakers, scientists and photographers are not, however, presented here through their professions. The photographs attempt, if only for a moment, to look beyond the public role usually associated with their names. Antonín Kratochvíl, Robert Vano, Vladimír Birgus, Jindřich Štreit and the members of the 400 ASA collective are themselves people accustomed to deciding where the camera will be pointed and when the shutter will be released. Those who have spent their lives observing others now become the observed. The photographic portrait thus acquires another dimension: it becomes an encounter between two gazes and two photographic experiences. The photographer does not confine his subjects within a single visual formula. At times he works with an environment that reveals something about the person portrayed; at others, he removes them from their usual context. Sometimes meaning emerges from a gesture or a gaze, at other times from the space, the light, or a small detail. What unites the photographs is not a formal method, but an interest in the individual and an attempt to capture the moment when a space for a genuine encounter opens up between photographer and subject.

In this respect, the photographs from the Emo Riot series occupy a special place within Bohemica. The girls photographed in the centre of Prague are not presented as a counterpoint to the “prominent personalities”. They are their equals within the collection. Their striking styling, clothing, hairstyles and the way in which they use their appearance to define themselves in relation to their surroundings remind us that a portrait is not merely an image of physical likeness. It is also a means by which a person creates themselves and expresses how they wish to be seen by others. The exhibition therefore raises one of the fundamental questions of portrait photography: who, in fact, do we see in a photograph? The person themselves, their public image, the photographer’s idea of them, or the version of themselves that the sitter chooses to present to the lens at that particular moment? Photography offers no definitive answer. Yet it is precisely the tension between these possibilities that gives portraiture its power. Bohemica – Faces of Our Country is therefore not an attempt to create a definitive portrait of the Czech Republic. Rather, it is an open visual archive of people who, at a particular time and in a particular place, encountered the photographer. Some form part of our collective memory; others remain anonymous. Some have profoundly influenced culture, science or public life, while others may only just be searching for their place. It is only when their photographs are brought together that they begin to create something no individual portrait could achieve on its own.