subject - object

FOTOFO in Photograph Gallery Profil, Prepoštská 4,814 99 Bratislava
Opening hours: 1 p.m. – 6 p.m. except Mondays

Exhibition by students of the studio of photography at the Faculty of Applied Art and Design, J.E.Purkyně University in Ústi nad Labem, installed within the framework of KONFRONTACE - a cycle of four exhibitions of Czech photographic schools and studios at the Prague House of Photography.

The FUUD Studio of Photography UJEP in Ústi nad Labem was opened eight years ago and during that interval some thirty students have passed through, eighteen of them still pursuing their studies here. After some initial years of searching for its own identity, the place succeeded in acquiring its own specific atmosphere, one that is developing and changing under the influence of the arrival each year of fresh students, yet, there is something that it constantly preserves. A stay in a town with an industrial and simultaneously post-communist architecture and life style which is the centre of the north-Czech region, a hotbed and an enclave of young artists who in a unique way have demarcated their place within the context of contemporary Czech art, the auspicious points ofintersections in the life paths of several teachers - kindred spirits with their students tuned to the same vein as regards vision and orientation - all this has contributed to the fact that this school hatchery has over recent years become the basis for deeper cooperation, promotion and even creative challenges to original school contracts. Overlappings and escapes occur, bringing new motivation and pleasure to the students themselves and their teachers. Motifs, subjects, themes of photography generated here, move over a broad range of take. However, right from the beginning two fundamental trends are meeting here - an objective distance, even an artful aloofness on the one hand, and a subjective approach on the other, when the author's inner statement is mediated solely by its external recording, although it is the focal point.
So then, object - subject... The photographic studio in Ústi nad Labem - there are ten players on the layground, one moment the ball is in the subject's half of the pitch, then in the object's, and the dividing line here and there is very indistinct indeed, and even becomes lost in the grass. The umpire sits on a bench by the sidelines and is evidently amused. And the players, too, visibly enjoy themselves.

Pavel Baňka, 1.6.2002