Evening Dress

All of us, even though we’re members of different communities, keep playing our own personal roles – one for the surrounding world and one for ourselves – as a reflection of our inner feelings, which we formulate in this way. We feel victorious as well as defeated, great as well as awkward and these feelings oscillate along extremely complex and hardly foreseeable trajectories, which we, for the most part, don’t have under control. Only in the depths of our souls do we sometimes admit our real state. We perform personal ritual dances for the general public as well as in absolute privacy for our own egos. In a world that imposes on us from all directions its grandiose spectacles, I strive for a perspective from the opposite side, from the side of the individual, who’s in fact lonesome in all this modern-day chaos and reliant only on his ability to cope, as best he can, with what surrounds him. Were you always interested in the areas you shoot or have you changed your focus? I admit I prefer the female element, but I also have to mention that I’ve worked with male models as well. It might have been a coincidence, but the male models were more patient and maybe even more interested in the work itself. I don’t use professional models, only exceptionally. They didn’t work well for me, they have a problem with reality, their world is different, alien to me. Perhaps some day I’ll want to show it. Models are everywhere around me, every person is a potential model, everyone deserves  special attention, everyone presents an invitation to penetrate into his ego, every person represents or symbolizes something, or is a piece of a larger puzzle which enables his unique role to manifest itself. Who are your photography heros or mentors? I, in fact, consciously continue in Drtikol’s footsteps. I emphasize optical values: may the photographer’s message meet with astonishment! And not only in images whose essence is pure vision, but also in imaginative pictures building on fantasy. In this way I profess my debt to the medium’s pictorial past represented, for example, by the above-mentioned Frantisek Drtikol (we are connected by our experience as painters).

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