FOTOFO
in Photograph Gallery Profil, Prepoštská 4,814 99 Bratislava

Opening hours: 1 p.m. – 6 p.m. except Mondays

...Miro Gregor has something in common with Bill Brandt. This "similarity", however, also means disparateness; while the former is interested in shape which he sees in a maximum plasticity, the latter follows lines and surfaces. The
former is in his vision a sculptor, the latter a graphic artist. The former strives for a reduction of the third
dimension to a two-dimensionalness of the photographic paper, the latter seeks this two-dimensionalness right in reality itself. The difference of these procedures thus becomes evident at first sight: Brandt is concerned with maximum modelling, while Gregor with maximum surface.

Both have the same goal: their interest is concentrated on primary form and unity of reality. As proof of their intent
both have chosen out of reality, that eternal motif - the female body.

Gregor makes use of sharp light and his female shapes become reduced to black and white. With him, very rarely do inter-stages exist between these poles and only quite exceptionally is he interested in the "third" dimension.
Nevertheless, the contour lines, the bounds of his own shadow and the shadow cast, wind along the surface of his
photographs with the same naturalness with which the sea creates profiles of rocks and shores. And more than that:
a photographer with an incontestable sense of a creative order of the surface, circles with his contour lines across
the photographic paper and achieves such a simplification and foreshortening that in the case of his photographs, we
may also speak of a line symbolizing natural processes.

However, this symbolizing trait of his sharply defined black-and-white world,, by its creative interpretation, is
not a meditation on partial, or mutually isolated processes(or isolated viewing), but again on total reality. The principal credit for this goes to the monumentality of Gregor's vision residing in the grandiose concept suppressing that kind of detail which usually is a residue
of narrow-minded naturalism.

Václav Zykmund

(Photographic nudes by Miro Gregor. Výtvarníctvo,Fotografia, Film No.4/1967, Bratislava)