Mezinárodní výstava fotografie | Databáze uměleckých výstav v českých zemích 1820

Commentary

In the spring 1936, the Mánes Association of Fine Arts (SVU Mánes) organized an exhibition of modern photography. In terms of the number of exhibited photographs, it was the largest photography exhibition of interwar Czechoslovakia, and the prestige of the participating artists along with the innovative conception made it also one of the most important. It was originally planned by the photographers Alexander Hackenschmied and Jiří Lehovec as a sequel to two earlier exhibitions they organized—New Photography (1930) and Modern Photography (1931)—and as a Czech version of the 1929 Stuttgart exhibition Film und Foto (Fifo). Although Hackenschmied and Lehovec decided to depart from the project in 1935, their successors Jiří Jeníček and Lubomír Linhart maintained the same conception. In the catalogue introduction, Linhart says that the exhibition aimed to “emancipate photography in terms of both its aesthetic and scientific function” and “show photography's social function” so that a new, totalizing definition of modern photography could be established [Linhart 1936, p. 5].

From this point of view, the exhibition built upon the multidisciplinary model introduced by Fifo, which became the first to abandon the conceptual and spatial hierarchy among photographs by amateurs, professionals and artists, elevating photography to the level of modern art [Witkovsky 2007, p. 59]. In the Czech context, the exhibition was preceded by international social-photography shows organized by the film-photo group of the Left Front. Although Mánes did not share the Left Front's Marxist conception of photography as a weapon of class struggle, it did oppose the formalism in pictorialist photography as presented at the salons, and it promoted the idea of the socially engaged photographer.

In order to showcase all functional and formal possibilities of modern photography, the exhibition presented both art photography and photography used in science, technology, advertising and printing [Linhart 1936, p. 5]. The photographs were divided into three sections according to their authors' country of origin: the first section consisted of 340 photographs by 63 photographers from Czechoslovakia, the second contained 160 photographs by international photographers from countries such as Germany, Belgium, USA, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Switzerland, while the third section presented 108 photographs by 38 Soviet photographers, the largest number to date in Czechoslovakia. In each of the sections, the photographs were displayed in alphabetical order by author name. The exhibition presented all kinds of photographic techniques – silver-bromide blow-up, photomontage, photogram, colour photography, macro and micro-photography – as well as diverse artistic styles such as Surrealism, New Vision, New Objectivity and activist documentary photography.

For this reason, it necessarily offered a mixed picture of photographic modernity, a feature that critics did not fail to point out. According to Robert A. Šimon, the show “lacked any unified program” [Šimon 1936, p. 60] and other critics focusing on amateur photography agreed. The organizers' anti-salon statements did not convince these critics because to them, the avant-garde experiments presented at the exhibition seemed equally formalist as pictorialist photographs. This skepticism toward experimental photography was in fact shared by the organizers themselves: in his articles published as part of the exhibition, Jeníček condemned these experiments as anachronistic and explained their presence at the exhibition by claiming that they are aesthetic models the can be “subsequently used for purposes of applied photography” [Jeníček 1936a, p. 17]. In contrast, documentary photography was generally well received by the critics, a sign that the photographic medium was now valued primarily as a source of information and evidence even in the art sphere. This is why the set of Soviet reportage photographs was unambiguously successful with the critics. Despite their propagandist character, occasionally criticized by the reviewers, these photographs made a strong impression and were admired for their vividness and spontaneity. The critics' preference for documentary rather than avant-garde photography did not apply to the works of Man Ray and John Heartfield. The former enjoyed great popularity in artistic circles and beyond and so even those who disliked his experiments in the end accepted their artistic quality, finding the much sought-after documentary value in his portraits. Heartfield's twenty political photomontages were stigmatized by both the far-right press and the German embassy, which even requested that two of them be removed from the exhibition. All other critics, however, received them very positively, praising them for the successful synthesis of political content and innovative form and the way they lent themselves for practical use in the press. The exhibition stirred a debate about the relationship between purpose and aesthetics in photography, leading to the founding of Mánes's photographic section in April 1936. Unlike the existing photographic associations, this one aimed to be “ambitious, open to experiments, principally pragmatic and purposeful” [Jeníček 1936b, p.12].

Fedora Parkmann

Works cited

Jeníček 1936a: Jiří Jeníček, Výstava mezinárodní fotografie v Mánesu, Letem světem X, 1936, no. 24, 24. 3., p. 17

Jeníček 1936b: - ček [Jiří Jeníček], Doslov k poměrům v naší fotografii, České Slovo, 1936, no. 84, 8. 4., p. 12

Linhart 1936: Lubomír Linhart, Úvodem, in: Jiří Jeníček – Lubomír Linhart, Mezinárodní výstava fotografie (exh. cat.), Budova Mánesa v Praze 1936, pp. 5–6

Šimon 1936: R.A.Š [Robert A. Šimon], Mezinárodní výstava fotografie, Foto-Noviny XVII, 1936, no. 4, 15. 4., pp. 59–61

Witkovsky 2007: Matthew S. Witkovsky, Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945 (ex. cat.), National Gallery of Art v Washingtonu 2007, p. 59