Urban landscapes

Drahomír Josef Růžička was a New York City doctor and an avid amateur photographer who had a strong influence on some of the most significant Czech Modernist photographers of the 20th century, including Josef Sudek, Jan Lauschmann and Jaromír Funke.

An exhibition of mostly urban images by Růžička at Galerie Fotografie Louvre shuttles back and forth between Prague and New York. This display of 33 works is selected from the 48 photos by Růžička in the corporate collection of PPF Art. Most of the photos are in black and white, and many of them exhibit Růžička's romantic approach to the urban landscape, achieved with the use of softening lenses.

The only two color works in the show, photos of New York that are larger than the rest of the prints, capture the city's tall buildings and fast-paced tempo. Later, Růžička became enamored of color film and, especially when shooting Manhattan's monumental skyscrapers, using sharper focus and a more dynamic angular composition.

Born in 1870, Růžička emigrated with his parents and siblings at the age of 6 to the rural heartland of America, settling on a farm near Wahoo, Nebraska. He returned to Europe to study medicine in Vienna, completing his studies in New York, where he opened an obstetrics and pediatrics practice on the city's Upper East Side.

He knew the Modernist photographers in the circle of Alfred Stieglitz's influential gallery; Edward Steichen and Clarence White were both friends, and, together with Růžička, they formed the group Pictorial Photographers of America in 1916.

At first, Růžička practiced an updated version of Pictorialism, in which the dreamy, soft-focus 19th-century mode gave way to a more modern, 20th-century sensibility. He was a purist, rejecting manipulation of the photo negative or positive.

Despite his ties to progressive photographers in the United States and his influence on the Czech avant-garde photographers, Růžička himself was not on the cutting edge. However, he was a key transitional figure. He gave up his medical practice a few years after the end of World War I, assisting instead in the birth of the next generation of Czech Modernist photographers.

Růžička transmitted his enthusiasm about the aesthetics of American Modernist photography back to his native country via the pages of Photographic Horizon, the journal of the Czech amateur photography movement in the 1920s. He frequently traveled back to Czechoslovakia, and also regularly exhibited his work.

One of the photos in the current exhibition is a brown-toned print (like many in the show) of a Gothic doorway, probably in Prague, with a shaft of sunlight slanting across the door. It is a study in textures and light, with the warm glow of sunshine extending an invitation to enter the heavy, tightly shut door.

An image that can be placed with certainty in lower Manhattan is March of Robots (so titled in the exhibition brochure, though no labels are placed next to the pictures in the show). A line of men in suits crosses a cobblestone intersection next to Trinity Church, on Broadway at Wall Street. The warm brown stone of the Gothic Revival church is flooded in light, washing out the architectural detail of this isolated gem hemmed in by the soaring limestone buildings of the Financial District.

A brown-toned print of two women in conversation at the base of the Jan Hus statue on Prague's Old Town Square in winter is soft-focus in the extreme; Týn Church towers in the background as a ghostly silhouette, with no detail of the building visible. The photo dates to sometime between the statue's erection in 1915 and Růžička's last trip to Prague in 1936. He died in 1960 on Long Island at the age of 90.

It is frustrating that the photographs in this show are not identified or dated. According to a gallery attendant, this information was unavailable when PPF bought the photos. That makes it difficult to chart the artist's development, and the cross-influences between New York and Prague that filtered through him. But a loose chronology can be surmised, for instance, by the date of Růžička's last trip to his homeland, or when particular structures were built.

Not every viewer will get hung up on history, however. Despite this shortfall, and the poor quality of some of the prints, the show provides a splendid promenade through early 20th-century Prague and New York - by turns dreamy and dynamic - by an artist who perpetually remained an amateur photographer in the most honorific sense of the word: someone who enthusiastically took pictures purely for the love of it.

Mimi Fronczak Rogers can be reached at
Features@praguepost.com