Taking pictures in Czech villages was boring, we were always more attracted to going to Slovakia, says Czech theorist and photographer Tomáš Pospěch.
Art historian and photographer Tomáš Pospěch is known for his long-term threat to the phenomenon of “Czechness” in his documentary projects and to map stereotypes in Czech society. However, his photographic beginnings are connected with north-eastern Slovakia, where he documented a Ruthenian village in the 1990s. “You are an easier country to photograph. Photography is worse in the Czech Republic and it was felt in the 90s, “says Tomáš Pospěch.
In addition to freelance work, Pospěch also works as a teacher and curator and runs a small publishing house PositiF focused on photography. He recently published a book in it Nová Sedlica Czech photographer Pavel Vavrouška, who documented the easternmost village in Czechoslovakia between 1971 and 1981.
How did the idea to publish a book of photographs from Nova Sedlice come about? Was this a topic that interested you for a long time?
When I started working in photography in the 1990s, I documented villages in the northeast of Slovakia and Kysucie, and I was interested in different approaches to photography for children. Later, in the catalog of the legendary exhibition 9 & 9, which was prepared in Plasy in 1981 by the theoretician of photography Anna Fárová, I also took a few pictures of Nova Sedlice by Pavel Vavroušek. I then showed them to the students several times, we talked about them and I realized during that I had to find Vavrouška one day.
Which photo did you take?
For example, it was a photo that is now on the back cover of a book, capturing children on hay dryers. The other three are in the book. On one you see two masters lying on top of each other and sleeping, on the other people lead a white horse pulling a cart and go downhill with it. For this last, Vavroušek catches people watering during Easter.
What attracted you?
With their power and the fact that they also have artistic and symbolic value. However, the personal factor is also important to me, because the photos were taken in a region where I went “on hikes”. When I was about seventeen, my friends and I found the most remote region, where no tourists go, where there is no civilization, but there are interesting people and nature. We could not go abroad, so we went to eastern Slovakia. Then I started going there to take pictures myself. These were my photographic beginnings.
At the end of last year, you published the book at PositiF, which has been running since 1999. Did you fulfill your personal commitment to this region?
Yes, but Vavroušek also fascinated me because he is an unknown author who photographed the village and did it completely differently than Karol Plicka before him and Jindřich Štreit did after him. Within the publishing house, I have a long-term effort to find various forgotten authors from the 80’s, who were somehow important or interesting at the time, but when the regime changed, they could not find in new conditions or began to live families, do business or photograph advertising and they stopped devoting themselves to free creation. Therefore, they are mostly unknown today.
That’s why I started looking for Vavrouška in a targeted way, but I couldn’t find him. This was later explained by that