Upon entering the Jiří­ Švestka Gallery, you immediately start looking for a theme in the group of big, black-and-white photographs, some sense of a story or continuity. Somewhere in the second room, around the 15th or 16th photograph, you recognize the subject of Markéta Othová's series "Talk to Her": It is Bjork. You also realize the mistake of your initial premise. Othová's is not the classic photographic story cycle, in which each click of the shutter is carefully planned and decisively snapped, and afterward, carefully edited and decisively displayed.

Instead, this is a continuation of Othová's practice of working in cycles, following her earlier series "Utopia" and "Return." "Talk to Her" consists of 31 photographs of the Icelandic music icon sitting in a garden restaurant in Venice, surrounded by friends and admirers. They comprise a study by this Czech photographer, the 2002 winner of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award, on the art of observation.

The shots, taken at short intervals, are seemingly random and unposed. The "story" is what you make of it. The cycle's simplicity forces viewers to get close to the images, observing every detail, searching for what Othová wants you to find.

Not driven by typical photographic motivations, and without a set theme or the aim of evoking a particular emotion, Othová's conceptually based cycle provokes exactly what she herself utilized in its creation: observation. The power of the work is that if you probe beneath the surface, you walk away not with a memory of 31 images, but of hundreds that stay with you long afterward.

The ostensible subject of the photographs, the "star," is not always the main focus of the image. Othová didn't change her position while shooting the sequence, so the view of Bjork is controlled by the people around her and by the singer herself. About six or seven scenes show Bjork with her back to the camera, talking to the woman in the fur hat. Others do not show her at all, as passers-by block the view. In the shots that do feature her, Bjork is by turns laughing, pondering or squinting in the sun, apparently candid. Yet she is obviously aware of the lens.

"Talk to Her" brings up several significant issues, including a consideration of candid versus posed photography and the hot-button topic of paparazzi. In these shots, Bjork, who typically refuses to have her picture taken and once famously attacked a member of the media after the reporter allegedly stuck a microphone in her young son's face, appears open and interacts freely with her friends. However, you have to wonder if there would have been any difference in the action had she been unaware of the photographer's lens.

Clearly, the difference between Othová's work and paparazzi photography is that the author arranged the situation ahead of time with the star, thus removing the clandestine and invasive aspect of the shoot. However, by capturing the everyday actions of a celebrity, Othová examines the common desire to expose them as they really are. Is her "Talk to Her" series, then, making a statement against paparazzi-style intrusion — or merely offering a less intrusive form of the same kind of voyeurism?