Opening: May 3rd 2017 at 6pm
May 4th – May 10th 2017
Holešovická šachta
Curator: Ondřej Chrobák
Adress: Na Šachtě 3, Praha 7
Entrance is from the street Bubenská 14.
The independent Department of Photography was established at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts in 1975 when it was separated from the Camera Department, and it is said to be among the oldest in Europe. At that time, the media was about 135 years old, and it was clearly thriving and growing even without being a subject of study at art colleges.
Today, after another more than 40 years of proliferation and mutation, nobody knows exactly what photography is or rather where it ends and something else begins that should be studied elsewhere, perhaps at another department. It’s been a long time since moving and static images were identified as two clearly separated domains that were encountered at different places (cinema/magazine), each of which requiring a different kind of attention.
A newspaper article on a computer monitor can be illustrated by a photo as well as by a 4- to 52-second video; the visual family memory in a digital shoebox alternately moves and stays still. And what alternately moves and stands still is also the caravan of the Department of Photography, as always curious about the current manifestations of the media mutations.