head: Markéta Kinterová
assistant: Veronika Daňhelová
Documentary photography encompasses a wide range of samples and approaches. Beginning with the effort to capture reality, with an emphasis on realism or subordinated to the intentions of a defined concept or ideology. Documentary photography has gone through great development, particularly in the last century and in the Czech tradition, also, depends upon some real distinct milestones. It is essential to include this tradition among the sources, as rare among current starting points. Allan Sekula, 40 years ago, pointed out the relationship to documentary photography or social photography and the failure of the aesthetics of realism, which paradoxically serves the status of the depicted individual in the role of passive victim, influenced by the media for many decades as spectators and receivers of these visual reports and are to which are quite successfully resistant. This perspective needs to be re-opened, revised and find a new starting point and manner of documenting events around us.
Work coming from this studio course should, as a result, pose questions social in character, critically define problematic and minor areas in the state of contemporary society and at the same time investigate new communication channels for presentation (from an exhibition project, artist’s book, publication in the media, online publishing, etc.).