 VLADIMÍR
BIRGUS
Vladimír Birgus influences the Czech photography
environment in a number of ways, as a photographer,
publicist, photography historian, educator and organizer
of many exhibitions. He is an untiring promoter of Czech
photography and an author and co-author of many books
about photography; and one of only a few Czech theoreticians
and historians of photography who have become known
internationally. As a professor of the Photography Department
at the Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of
Performing Arts in Prague and the Head of the Institute
of Creative Photography of the Silesian University in
Opava, from which he has methodically been building
a prestigious academy of photography since 1990.
He started taking photographs when he was ten, in a
student photo club in Příbor. At that time he was interested
in staged photography, which he pursued with still greater
intensity during his secondary school studies in Olomouc.
When he was 17, he had his first solo exhibition in
the Arcade Gallery in Olomouc. That gallery often gave
opportunity to young and unofficial artists, and he
himself in the following years helped to organise photography
exhibitions there. From fitful, occasionally symbolically
over-charged scenes, undeniably influenced by the Epos
group then active in the nearby city of Brno, Birgus
gradually came to intellectually more profound sequences,
in which the storyline is barely indicated and difficult
to express in words. These works suggest his enthusiastic
admiration for the movies of Michelangelo Antonioni,
which Birgus still feels are some of the best ever made.
Other, equally advanced series from this time feature
selective, aestheticized details of the naked bodies
of a black man and a white woman (Counterpoint, 1973-74)
and metaphorically conceived fragments of sea water
and cliffs. Avant-garde painter and photographer Václav
Zykmund, one of the most prominent authorities in Czech
modern art, who met Birgus during the latter’s university
studies (Department of Literature, Theater anfd Film,
Palacký University, Olomouc) wrote (under the pseudonym
Alena Šlachtová, his real name suppressed for political
reasons) about the Counterpoint series for the catalogue
to an exhibition held by Birgus at the Galerie mladých
(Young People’s Gallery) in Brno in 1974 : "In
my opinion, the most interesting is the series in which
the author opposes fragments of two naked bodies – of
a dark-skinned man and a light-skinned woman – in thoroughly
harmonious compositions; the tonal contrast, which is
indicated by silhouettes rather than by illusion of
mass weight, evokes unmediated associations with fundamental
natural archetypes. These are photographs in which everything
is "carefully planned" – but this apparently
rational approach is more valid for viewers than for
the author, who was led by human physiology, i.e. his
innate sense of composition, rhythm and proportions.”
Birgus's first series of socially oriented documentary
photographs – taken in a mentally handicapped children's
home, where he had a summer job as a volunteer – was
created in Belgium in 1972. But it was only three years
later, when visiting the United Kingdom, that he began
to work systematically in this area. Parts of the East
End series were published in the third issue of Československá
fotografie in 1976. A year later the same magazine published
photos taken during his second visit to the UK in 1976;
those later works went even deeper under the skin of
events, even as Birgus loosened his compositional structure.
Here we observe the first indications of a compositional
formlessness accompanying a sharpened underlying conception.
Henceforth, attention in Birgus’s work is focused not
on particular people or countries but on the universality
of emotional experience. His goal has been to create
authentic photographs from life with the requisite formal
values corresponding to a symbiosis of the concrete
and the symbolic, which at the same time reflect the
author's point of view and above all help the viewer
to see and understand more clearly. Birgus slowly created
his own photographic signature. Even from a formal standpoint
his photographs were easy to recognise, especially in
the Czech context. They were presented without tonal
gradation, in sharp, grainy contrasts of black and white.
Professor Ján Šmok, the legendary founder and long-time
head of the Photography Department of the Academy of
Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague, played a very important
role in Vladimír Birgus's life and work. Birgus recalls
his influence: "Professor Šmok fascinated me from
the moment I first saw him, at a lecture for Olomouc
photographers. He was a terrific orator and panellist.
With his breadth and depth of knowledge, his ability
for precise formulation, dramatic invention and witty
endings, and his self-confidence, charm and courage,
he differed so greatly from most of the frightened teachers
I had met until then at various schools. He did not
photograph much himself; after his death, however, we
arranged a small exhibition of his unseen, unpublished
photographs and it showed that he was in fact a good
photographer. But above all he had his own, original
theory of communication, and could analyse photos precisely
and point out all sorts of mistakes. Because of this,
he helped many photographers, myself included, in their
beginners' fumblings. I came to his Prague "school"
every week – it was an unofficial preparatory course
for FAMU. I placed first in the admissions test for
photography in 1974, but the Ministry of Education would
not let me study there and also at the Philosophical
Faculty of Palacky University, which I liked and did
not want to leave. Šmok tried hard to arrange things,
but unsuccessfully. So I began by sitting in at least,
going once or sometimes twice a week by express train,
leaving Olomouc at 5 am to be at the Academy in time
for 9 am lectures. After four years, Šmok offered me
an assistant's position at the Department and I enthusiastically
accepted. The beginning was hard – the first day he
appointed me a tutor for a group in which all the students
except Štěpán Grygar were older than me. But they accepted
me. Thanks to Šmok’s skilful leadership, the Photo Department
was an oasis of freedom in times characterised by the
lack of it. Well, he bothered everyone a lot with all
his regulations, deadlines, tags, numerical codes and
rubber stamps, but all the same he made up for that
by unforgettable trips to Karlštejn, Poněšice or Levoča,
by his windjammer stories and – above all – the freedom.
It was a priceless gift.”
In 1977, before he began to teach at FAMU, Vladimír
Birgus founded the Dokument group together with his
friends Petr Klimpl and Josef Pokorný. The three were
inspired by new trends in documentary photography, which
ran counter to the tradition of reportage in the style
of the "decisive moment." Another non-traditional
aspect in the Czech context of that time was the group’s
systematic focus on middle-aged people, resulting in
their project Productive Age. In addition to images
conceptually close to the orientation of the group,
Birgus shifted his interest from sociological work to
much more general and symbolic, subjective photographs.
This change was effected to a large extent under the
influence of the time. Documentary photography was not
much appreciated in society; it found its way into magazines
only rarely, and books designed by the photographers
themselves almost never appeared. Most exhibited and
published photographs were superficially descriptive,
uninventive representations of conventional realities.
This handicap affected the otherwise outstanding and
promising group Oči (Eyes), from Žilina, and even the
Productive Age project by Dokument, as well as the documentation
of Prague-Žižkov undertaken in the late 1970s - early
1980s by FAMU teachers and students.
The photographs by Vladimír Birgus are usually understood
as subjective documents. As such, they are aligned with
approaches developed by Louis Faurer, Lisette Model,
William Klein, Robert Frank and other representatives
of the “New York School of Photography” in the USA in
the 1950s. At the same time in Czechoslovakia, where
cheap socialist-realist photography alternated with
humanistic reportage and a poetics of everyday life,
the subjective documentary style found a voice only
exceptionally (Viktor Kolář). Unlike Henri Cartier-Bresson,
Werner Bischof or David Seymour, whose work held great
popularity, Frank and Klein were virtually unknown among
Czech and Slovak photographers.
The character of subjective documentary work can be
seen in Birgus's early series Sleepers, begun in 1974
when Birgus began his studies at FAMU. With unconventionally
composed snapshots Vladimír Birgus puts in his Something
Unspeakable series a multi-faceted testimony in which
are joined sadness, loneliness and estrangement, and
a feeling of uprootedness. Photographs are nearly ideal
mirrors, which do not manipulate us but speak about
what is going on inside of us, or – perhaps even more
accurately – what we are able to find in them.
Birgus set off on a visual adventure to recast reality.
His art is characterised by the clarity of its construction
and by its rationality, which however does not interfere
with an emotive visual message. His rationality is betrayed
as well by the meticulous composition, which on occasion
seems to be calculatedly uncomposed. He does not organise
what he wants to depict, but rather the space of the
photograph and the relationships between figures in
it. He does not use optical or movement blur, almost
everything in his pictures is sharp. Also characteristic
of Birgus's work is his often symbolic use of shadows.
Many photographs feature a clear definition between
light and shade, the confrontation of a person with
his or her own shadow, occasionally even the shadowed
presence of the photographer himself.
The development of Birgus's subjective documentary work
is characterised by extraordinary integrity and the
ongoing construction of his own symbolic language out
of unambiguous and verbally expressible meanings. Everything
in his pictures has the potential to carry visual meanings.
The underlying story is gradually left behind, and any
signs of it are dropped. Over the years, the author
has used fewer and fewer expressive elements, concentrating
on a few persons and gestures that we could not call
a story even if we really wanted to.
One is on one’s own in this world. Headstands at tents
on a Kirghiz plateau, or between the walls of a baywatch
house on Miami Beach, or in Central Park with skyscrapers
in the background. A couple embracing, a little humanity
and intimacy in an anonymous crowd. A man lying on the
sidewalk in one corner of a photograph, while an elderly
couple in another corner, perhaps husband and wife,
shield their eyes and gaze somewhere far beyond the
picture. Pedestrians passing each other in the street.
Everyday situations that repeat themselves so many times
that we do not really see them any more. This is the
typical perception of Vladimír Birgus's photographs.
But what are they "speaking" about?
The real significance of these photographs is not concrete.
We might characterise them in a general way as impressions
in a metropolis: the confrontation of man and the man-made
environment, the contrast between people and monumental
city architecture, loneliness captured in a crowd. The
people in Birgus's photographs are often looking elsewhere,
their backs turned, or stand so far away that we cannot
see their faces and expressions. Anonymous people who
do not open a dialogue by gestures or facial expressions.
They are left to themselves, wandering in the world
into which the have been cast, and no one will help
them. They stand with eyes closed, looking somewhere
far away, screening their eyes to see even better, as
if struck by something outside the picture, following
something invisible to us; they walk, caught in the
banality of walking, or just stand on their hands.
It doesn’t matter whether Birgus took his photographs
in London, Moscow, New York, Warsaw, Miami or Prague.
As Miroslav Vojtěchovský remarked in the catalogue to
an exhibition of his work in Opava, Birgus's colour
photos have the attributes of a well-set trap for uninformed
viewers: snapshots of people from far abroad, often
from exotic countries. But the attractive environment
plays no important role in the photographs, and if there
were remnants of such exoticism, they disappeared once
the borders were opened in the early 1990s. What remains
is the universality of communication, regardless of
the country in which the photographs were taken.
Apparently simple and, at first sight, perhaps thematically
uninteresting views conceal a rich lexicon of gestural
nuance and meanings, which has been developed for three
decades now. Birgus's photos contravene lay viewers’
expectations. He does not seek attractive views of well-known
places and does not try to catch the “face” of a landscape
as on a postcard, but instead depicts motifs that correspond
to his inner vision.
In the course of these three decades, a certain development
may be discerned. Birgus’ photography is less and less
narrative, and its communicative strength lies increasingly
in visual aspects – colour, light and shadow, form.
At the same time, what has come to the fore is that
which the author himself described with the term "subjective
document" in the early 1980s: the representation
of feelings, that “nothing much is happening, but it’s
interesting.”
From the beginning of the 1980s he has been taking both
black-and-white and colour photographs. Colour documentary
photography is still not well represented in the Czech
context. Birgus is not simply using colour film instead
of black-and-white, however, but rather working with
colours as independent visual components in order to
accord a psychological and emotive impact to the photograph.
He has never let colour lead him astray in colour photographs,
as if he carried over the principles of work in black
and white to the realm of colour. He mostly uses one
colour in a non-coloured environment, or shows non-coloured
figures against distinctive-coloured (usually red or
yellow) background. A woman curls dreamily on the edge
of a bench, her only complement in the infinite visual
plain the photographer’s shadow. A painted rear facade
of a house and a man with a cone bag of sweets who multiplies
his pleasure by basking in the last rays of the setting
sun. He does not leave the colour composition to chance
but subordinates it to photographic expression to such
an extent that the result departs from ordinary optical
experience, rendering the photograph as little "real"
or "probable" as the fantastic, abstract range
of black-and-white photographs. In this sense, the photographs
of Vladimír Birgus bridge the realms of documentary
and abstract creative photography. Wherever he is, he
looks for the images he carries within him. His photographs
are symbols of the universe.
Tomáš Pospěch
Text to the book „Something
unspeakable“
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