Přehled o publikaci

The study about important, but internationally still less known Czech avant-garde photographer Eugen Wiškovský (1888-1964) is a part of a report from international symposium of top European historians of photography. The symposium was organized as a part of international festival of photography PhotoEspaňa in May 2017 at the main building of laCaixa Foundation in Madrid. The oeuvre of the leading Czech avant-garde photographer Eugen Wiškovský is not large in size or range of topics, yet it is great owing to its originality, depth of ideas, and mastery of form. In his early works, from the late 1920s and early 1930s, in the style of New Objectivity, Wiškovský sought artistically effective forms in apparently nonaesthetic objects. By the use of crops, changing scale, and inventive lighting, he freed them from secondary aspects, allowing the elementary lines of these forms to stand out. He often emphasized potential metaphorical meanings as well. In his dynamic diagonal compositions, Wiškovský was among the most radical practioners of Czech Constructivist photography. Similarly, his landscape work is highly individual, sometimes employing form analogies to accentuate visual symbols. Important are also his texts from the theory of photography.