Photography without a camera

Over the past two years, the Louvre Gallery of Photography has mounted a series of solo exhibitions showcasing the corporate photography collection of the Czech financial group PPF. The 10th show in this cycle highlights one of the most innovative artists working with photography in the second half of the 20th century, and until recently one of the most overlooked: Běla Kolářová.

The recognition came just in time as Kolářová died April 12 at the age of 87.  

A display of 28 black-and-white photography-based works contains all 18 of her pieces owned by the PPF Group, with an additional 10 on loan from the artist. It is a tightly focused show, centering on Kolářová's work from the 1960s, when she was avidly exploring camera-less processes. Her experiments during this time included developing the photogram and - perhaps her most important contribution - creating pictures with "artificial negatives."

Born in 1923 in the north Bohemian fortress town (and later internment camp) Terezín, she went to work in 1943 at the Baťa shoe factory in Zlín, where she met her future husband, the seminal visual artist and poet Jiří Kolář (1914-2002). They wed in 1949, and over the course of their long marriage often collaborated on making art. Yet Kolářová's career was largely overshadowed by that of her husband, and cut off by the political situation at home.

She had her first solo show in 1966, but, in the "normalization" period following the 1968 Soviet-led invasion, the couple could not exhibit or publish. In 1977, Jiří Kolář became a Charter 77 signatory. In 1979, he received a grant to work in West Berlin for one year and was not allowed to return home. The couple settled in Paris, but in 1981 Kolářová had to return to Prague to deal with the paperwork for the forfeiture of her husband's property (he had been convicted in absentia of leaving Czechoslovakia without permission), and she was not allowed to leave to rejoin him until 1985. After 1989, the couple began making regular visits to Prague, returning permanently to the Czech Republic in 1999. No specific cause of death was released on Kolářová, though by all accounts it was from natural causes.

Kolářová had started taking photographs after World War II, influenced by avant-garde photographers such as Man Ray and Lázlo Moholy-Nagy as well as Czech experimental photographers such as Jaromír Funke and Jaroslav Rössler. In the early 1960s, a statement she read in a photography magazine articulated her dissatisfaction with classic methods of photography: "The whole world has been photographed!" Convinced that traditional photography was exhausted, Kolářová left the lens behind and started making the "photographs without a camera" that are the focus of this exhibition.

The show begins with five "light drawings" from the 1968 series "Fractions of Time," which she made by rotating photo paper in concentric circles or moving it in a linear direction. Using ordinary hardware-store items such as hinges and washers, she created concentric circles and arcs of objects across the photo paper, expressing rhythm and the passage of time in shades of gray.

Just as her husband devised numerous techniques for making collages, Kolářová invented a number of methods and technologies to create works emphasizing light, line and form. She used two types of artificial negatives. The first, which she called vegétages, were created from tiny compositions laid on celluloid and then projected through an enlarger onto light-sensitive paper. In the second type, which she called "Traces," she imprinted the objects in paraffin, which was spread onto celluloid.

One of the "Traces" from 1960 near the beginning of the show embodies the "new realities" Kolářová was able to achieve in this manner. It is like a fractured landscape, with a depth of field and a distinct foreground and horizon, but everything collapsing in upon itself in this dreamlike environment.

On the gallery's back wall is a group of photos related to the assemblages she continued to develop over her career: a patchwork of fabric samples from 1960, photos from the "Hair" cycle composed of knots of dark hair and longer snips of blond hair, and Alphabet of Things from 1964, in which she sees letters in ordinary hardware and household items such as pliers, hooks and a belt clasp. Kolářová would later expand on these motifs, becoming a pioneer in making art with everyday items like sewing boxes and makeup women's cases.

In other works, she enlarged to nearly monumental proportions such common utilitarian objects as the eye for a dress hook, encouraging a deeper and more sensitive perception of the small, overlooked things around us.

Kolářová's poetic discovery and rearrangements of ordinary objects from her environment, along with her determination to find new ways of working with light and composition despite her disdain for the traditional medium of photography, combine to make her one of the most important Czech artists of the second half of the 20th century.

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