VLADIMÍR BIRGUS

Vladimír Birgus (born 1954) is a defining, influential presence in Czech photography in a number of ways: as a photographer, publicist, historian, educator and curator. He has tirelessly promoted Czech photography at home and abroad, in a wide range of exhibitions and books, and is one of only a few internationally recognized theoreticians and historians of photography in the Czech Republic. In his own photographic work, Vladimír Birgus has devoted his attention to the subjective document since the first half of the 1970s, eloquently expressed in his series Something Unspeakable. His composition and use of colour and tone are rigorous, but never foreclose freedom of interpretation regarding the content of his images, which is always intimated. It can be said that his photographs are about emotions, moods, hidden desires and experiences. He disturbs us with an indicated happening which everyone can perceive in his or her own way. With an abundance of everyday situations he shatters our restless and hectic era into thousands of fragments and reverberations in our ownselves. Although Vladimír Birgus’s photographs nominally present scenes from the most disparate places on earth, their deeper meaning coheres on an existential plane: hurried loneliness in the middle of a crowd, the conflicts between dreams and reality, what is left unsaid or merely suspected. Ultimately, these works comment on a universal, interior state, borne with varying degrees of intensity in our souls.

Tomáš Pospěch

Text on the book-jacket „Something unspeakable“

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