SOMETHING UNSPOKEN BY VLADIMÍR BIRGUS

When gazing at the photographs by Vladimír Birgus we cannot but recall all his activities as a professor in the Department of Photography of the Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague and the head of the Institute of Creative Photography of the Silesian University in Opava, the curator of dozens of notable exhibitions or as the author of a number of books about photography. It is by no means simple to combine the profession of a photographer, a pedagogue, a theoretician and a curator in such a way that the author’s work as a photographer does not succumb to the influences and trends about which he writes and which he encounters in exhibition halls or during his pedagogical activity.

Vladimír Birgus has devoted his attention to subjectively orientated documentary photography since the first half of the 1970s. He gained the strong impulse which directed him to an ever greater extent to the
documentary sphere during his sojourn in Great Britain as a student in 1975. By that time he had already acquired experience in the fields of portraits and staged photographs and, as regards nudes, from his sophisticated series entitled Counterpoints. Like many other documentary photographers, Vladimír
Birgus found his motifs in the streets of towns and the great variety of official commemorative occasions. In the former Czechoslovakia, he ranked among the few photographers who for many years photographed with unconcealed irony and sarcasm the obligatory May Day celebrations and other communist
holidays and drew attention to the discrepancies between the official optimism and bombastic slogans and the devastation of the people and the living environment. However, above all he centred his interest on documentary photographs of a metaphorical nature; portraits of seemingly ordinary everyday moments in which, by means of visual symbols depicting unusual pictorial compositions, he revealed a special mysterious atmosphere which could be expressed in words only with great difficulty. During nearly
three decades there thus originated his series entitled “Something Unspoken,” assembled without the use of any arranging.

Beginning in the 1980s, the photographer began to give preference to colour. The range of colours which he uses in his photographs is very often reduced to subdued shades of blue and almost black-and-white. On the other hand, we often encounter a striking, dominant use of a red or yellow surface. Just as in modern painting, where colour is frequently not intended as a faithful depiction of exterior reality in our world, Vladimír Birgus chooses only a part of the colour spectrum. A red area contains strength and a glow and a loud signal are revealed by colour. In a photograph taken in Paris in 1990 we can decipher the torso of the Eiffel Tower against the background of a blue sky and also the neighbourhood of a dominant ochre
wall. The seemingly flat composition acquires its mysterious character by means of cast shadows (perhaps during the early dawn or at the end of the day) in which an important role is played by moving figures -- indicated only in shadow -- opposite which there emerges from the depth of the dark area a contrasting, small red area with a figure who is portrayed realistically. This figure might seems unimportant, but in fact it anchors the entire picture, filling it with restlessness. In the composition of the photograph, it is this detail that creates a quite necessary colour counterbalance to the other, monochromatic areas.

A similar parallel can be seen in a photograph taken on the streets of New York City in 1995. Nothing points to a concrete place in wealthier or poorer quarters. Here we see a conspicuous red area of a newspaper stand, which figuratively looks like an enormous technical monster, as well as figures
moving against a huge wall. The first, attired in a red coat, expresses hope, the way ahead, while the smaller black figure in the centre, receding into the distance, is quite possibly a metaphor for sorrow. The example of the two incidentally described photographs indicates that the photographer is fond of working with symbolic meanings. Naturally, he doesn’t forget the careful composition even though considerably remote from the classical rules. He uses tonal and colour contrasts, but ultimately leaves the viewer an all-important latitude to interpret what is intimated. He is indifferent to questions about the origin of his photographs, because he doesn’t provide complete information about a concrete place. In the present rapid course of the world every passing second has its own importance and climax. It is quite possible that viewers will find in Vladimír Birgus’s photographs a number of other ties and symbols and consequently also episodes. It can be said that his photographs treat 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 own selves.

On first analysis, Vladimír Birgus’s photographs present miniepisodes taking place in the most varied places of our planet, while on another plane they inform us mainly about the present hurried process of globalisation of society, loneliness in the middle of a crowd, the contrasts between dreams and reality, the not fully said and the suspected. In other words, they describe the inner state borne with various degrees of intensity in our souls.

Václav Podestát

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