Míšenka shot with Anička who is an ingenious dancer. Maki and Martínek. Jíra and Hanička with a Blaník knight. With Frient, me on left. Daddy invented this for me – he feared I would smash my knob. My son and his family. They both like the hammock a lot, my cousin can swing it and Terezka hoots. Our men filling a pool at our friend’s place. Tomík, Luky and daddy working on the intercom. In front of the camera are Míša, her aunt and a butterfly of unknown origin which fortunately survived the taking this snapshot without detriment to its health. ¹

If we enter the phrase “photography and family” in the Czech Google search engine, approximately ²,400.000 references appear; if we enter it in English, the number of references goes up to about 112,000.000. No wonder. Apart from photographs of landscapes, travels and trips with artistic aspirations, family photography probably represents the most widespread category of amateur photography. They are basically variations of a single subject – the effort to “authentically” capture both holiday and everyday family life. And if these photographs do not seem comprehensible enough, their creators feel obliged to accompany them with explanatory captions so that it is clear to the widest public who is who.

The popularity of family photography has not even been avoided in professional magazines. The Photorevue, for example, ran an article entitled “Family Photography”.2 Although its authors note that, from the view of more advanced photographers, the family genre is something inferior – something that anybody can do –, despite this it is worth making some effort. Reportedly, a commonplace photograph intended for a private album and an immensely valuable, almost artistic photograph can both be made; and in order to achieve the latter, the article’s several brief chapters provide numerous well-intentioned pieces of advice. If we are supposedly able to follow most of them, we can begin to perceive this field with the same respect as one would view documentary, journalistic, social and portrait photography.

The profusion of family photographs is understandably not a phenomenon of recent years. It has only become more widespread and visible, which is especially due to the arrival of new technologies – creating and processing of as well as presenting photographs has become much faster and easier. This of course also turned into a phenomenon which marketing could not fail to notice: even such a titan as Microsoft, in an ad promoting one of its products, claims that Nothing is more valuable as the recollections we have of pleasant moments, friends and family, kept in living memory with the help of photographs, and the flash advertising banners on various internet servers, which offer endless possibilities to store our photographs, assure us that we thus certainly would not suffer a loss.

Most families, moreover, stash boxes packed with family photographs, taken in the past using the traditional method of film. The better ones have made it into albums as a reminder of pleasant and emotionally charged situations, to represent to the outside world and as a report to future generations. (All this is also proved by a rather innocent comment made by a participant of a family server discussion, stating that she was not going to make the cake for her daughter’s first birthday herself but that she planned to buy it, for it will look better in the photographs. Here, an intimate experience was replaced by the need of recordable and, mainly, presentable perfection.) The internet has only further intensified this natural need: we can click through to millions of trivial photographs, the sense of whose presentation to the public is incomprehensible to all viewers except several corresponding relatives and friends. The randomly selected favourite became the blog of a woman named Jiřina, a lady in her fifties, as one might gather from the photographs. She does not only publish shots of herself (introduced by the caption “Me – and something or someone”) and events happening around her, but also of her Sunday lunch, freshly planted flowers or repaired pavement. In another context, this series would undoubtedly represent a rather interesting material for exhibition.

Family has two aspects: it is an essentially private subject and, simultaneously, a subject that is public and political. It mainly comes to the foreground during the pre-election period when it is necessary – often through popular steps like increasing birth grants or introducing various social comforts for young/incomplete/poor and otherwise handicapped families – to lure voters. Or it arrives to the scene at the moment when these comforts are (usually after the elections) annulled and the public is asked to understand the new steps taken in the interest of a balanced state budget. There is probably no election campaign which would not be accompanied by the photographs of politicians and their happy families, what frequently is a very effective tool in election battles. Once the elections are over, they nevertheless follow the destiny of the above-mentioned social comforts and allowances: they disappear from the scene.

Sociology defines family as a group of people who are directly linked by blood relations, marriage or adoption and whose adult members are responsible for bringing up children. Although an explicit definition of family is not part of the legal code of the Czech Republic, the code mainly describes it as a unit established through marriage. Family, however, can be also understood as a small group of people not only interlinked by marital relations and relations of kinship, but also by other similar relationships and mainly by a shared way of life. Other definitions describe family via its functions: reproductive, social economic, culturally educational, socially psychological and emotional. ³ A registered partnership, adopted by the Czech legal code in 2006, officially extended the given concept to homosexual couples. But the real milestone will be when the latter couples are given the legal chance to adopt children.

Family has been a frequent subject of researches carried out by countless professionals in many fields – sociologists, psychologists, demographers and pedagogues (just think of the vast number of handbooks instructing us how to bring up children properly, how to play with them, how to get along with them etc. etc.!); it has been thoroughly contemplated upon by writers, philosophers, journalists, moralists as well as the widest public. No one doubts that we are currently undergoing a certain transformation process; only those who take part in the discussions seem to be unable to come to an agreement whether the change is positive or negative. Let us, nonetheless, note that in certain intervals of time, such a radical transformation has been present in society since time immemorial – whether in prehistory, when hunters developed into pickers, or in the Middle Ages when family or, respectively, a household, consisted of all people living under the same roof – i.e. from those blood-related to the domestics and servants. The concept of “our” traditional family, which today takes on a new and different form, was born as late as in modern times.

Moreover, the 20th century awarded many rights and possibilities to women, who were solely family members in the past. The 21st century is described as theirs – while men hitherto have not cared about their traditional role in life at all, they will have to start fighting for it now. All of a sudden, it is men who represent the conservative component of society, and it is women who came to embody progress: they seek changes. They turned into the movers of political dynamics. This third feminist generation tries to change social structures, and thus genuinely participates in enforcing and implementing distinct social changes. ⁴ Besides, according to psychologists, people today do not establish families because of economic reasons but because of mutual affection. They rather build on feelings, which at the same time results in a more unsteady character of their bonds and is also one of the reasons for the existing high divorce rate. ⁵ The partnership transitoriness, somehow equated to the lifespan of consumer goods, is discussed by Zygmunt Bauman. The author opines that we stay in a relationship as long as it brings satisfaction, and as soon as it is exhausted, we leave it. True, such an approach indeed does not motivate partners to work hard and tenaciously at their co-existence. ⁶

A cliché claims that artists are endowed with more sensitivity to the surrounding events which they are subsequently capable of recasting into an authentic and unique work. Although many artists confess that their strong source of inspiration were exactly the relationships in their own family, childhood, partnership and so on, we do not find too many works where such relationships would be directly reflected – at least in the Czech environment, and especially if the main actor on the stage is one’s own family in the first person. This probably echoes a contention of two antitheses – a certain shyness on one hand (we must not forget that the actors in the play is not only the artist but also his or her family members who do not always have to agree with their role; for example, when Jiří David exhibited photographs of his son, some said that he was in fact abusing him) and, on the other hand, the surfacing natural need of self-representation and the urge to point to a wider social context on the model of a functioning or, eventually, non-functioning family.

According to Roland Barthes, the photographic message is simple: “This was” – even though he knows for certain that photographs can be deceptive or, respectively, untrue on the level of perception but true on the level of time, and are thus “images tainted with reality“. ⁷ I think that the same more or less holds for the artists presented at the 7th photo festival “Funke’s Kolín”. It cannot be said unambiguously what they have in common and whether they have something in common at all. Each of them approaches the subject of family in his or her own manner – for some, photographs became a means of coping with certain life situations, for others, a means of “objective” research. The exhibiting artists naturally are not the only ones whose oeuvres include family captured through the medium of photography; let us also mention the examples of Petr Pastrňák’s 1997 slide show Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter presented at the Stone Bell House, the series Mothers and Daughters by Pavel Baňka from between 2003 and 2005, and Pavel Cais’ 2006 exhibition of installations and photographs, entitled 9+6. A personal reflection of family can also be found in live photography (e.g. Bohdan Holomíček). The present seventeen series nevertheless illustrate a rather wide-ranging scope of possible approaches and solutions.

Probably the most open and rawest Kolín view into family privacy comes from Petra Steinerová. In her series entitled dad, she uses photography in an attempt to find and define her own attitude to her father who, at the age of 55, decided to change his sex as a result of an enduring family crisis. The series was aptly described by Viktor Kolář, Steinerová’s teacher at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague: more often than not, all the closest people – children, wife, parents and others – simply find themselves “incapable of coping” with such a non-precedent situation, and since they cannot depart from any previous experience, knowledge or preparation, there is nothing left but love, compassion, tolerance… However, there are still moments when one wants to forget, escape to “another world“, or even cease to exist. Petra decided to face the problem point-blank and began to photograph her father. In his apartment, during the transformations of his looks, in the moments of his ups and especially downs when even the medication did not work and, finally, in situations when the family again meets at a table. The number of photographs is gradually increasing. Equally increasing is their power and cogency and the emphatic character of their value of notice. Steinerová in no way ranks amongst those who would seek to shock with subjects which were, until recently, considered taboo. The way she aids herself through the photographic medium, she reveals a bit the issue of pain and suffering, the world of humans, to the others. ⁸

Martin Voříšek experienced a similar purgatory process when he began to work on his series Chronicle after the suicide of his elder brother. He devoted to him the exhibited family saga in which he summarizes and explores his own journeys of life and those of people around him. He, however, does not only reflect his own momentary feelings; he also turns to the past, finding out old negatives which otherwise would be forgotten for good and, by enlarging photographs of his close relatives and himself, thus opens up to a natural commemorative therapy. Enlarging photographs, nevertheless, is not enough: Voříšek processes them further, seeping the prints through the light of a Xerox machine. He seeks something more substantial – something that is hidden in the subtle grey tones of the photographic image – and, in the faces of “his family”, looks for things that are yet to come. These images serve him as a means for deciphering the future which has already happened. In addition, the person to whom the photographer devoted the series was specified in two exhibited “sub-files”: negatives of his brother doing yoga in a totally unromantic environment, and four blowups of him.

Sylva Francová captured her family – her mother, grandmother, sister and other women from her closest circle – in the exhibited cycle Women’s Portraits. The main aim of the seven large-dimensional photomontages, departing from the previously taken shots, was to observe similar codes and motives of behaviour and rituals. Women’s Portraits are stories of commonplace, everyday activities tied to the intimate milieu of the individual actors who are photographed in different situations and roles, performing their everyday duties including cleaning and ironing, as well as in the moments of leisure and rest – all in all, in situations when they are nothing but themselves, even if they just gaze out of the window. Francová entered the private sphere of the depicted women in order to present some kind of a mosaic of situations and appearances, and she in now way limited herself to seizing a moment. She describes her work thusly: “I have picked up a similar way as the Cubists; I capture a person from several angles simultaneously, in the framework of a single scene. My way of portraiting women is to give their true picture in their intimate space by inserting their various appearances.” ⁹

At a glance, it would probably never cross our minds that the photographic series Family Portraits by Marie Dvořáková do not illustrate authentic scenes from family birthday parties and other family gatherings. The participants gaze into the camera, strike the pose, seem to be totally satisfied and want to look good. A closer exploration, however, shows that the photographs – unlike the avalanches of amateur photographs taken during similar family events – are far too perfect; and an even closer examination reveals an alien figure – a violator, a thief, a snooper; simply someone who clearly disturbs the festive atmosphere, its peace, contentment and glimpses of smiles (and maybe also affectation). The figure always hides somewhere in the background, behind the window; we can see its reflection in the mirror; sometimes, it is in the same room with the photographed people and, during one photo session, it was most probably absent. The photographer realized that family photographs frequently do not represent imprints of real emotions, affections and moods, and even though she created her series in the manner usual for family gatherings, she was interested in the very aspect of disturbing and disrupting the commonplace situation. “The inspiration here was our own family archive… It has dawned on me that all those content and elated faces often were not as candid as they pretended to be… As if people posed and attitudinized only to avoid their problems and their revelation. They also might have feared the loss of their privacy.” ¹⁰

The series Album, exhibited by Aneta Grzeszykowska, questions quite a few established theories – and mainly those linked with the “true character” of photography. The presented work is a photographic album in which Grzeszykowska’s parents documented her childhood. But flipping through it makes us realize that the main character is somehow non-existent all over – for the artist digitally removed her own figure from all the pictures, which were taken a long time ago in order to prove her existence on this plane. The result is bizarre and annoying – we know that someone’s missing here, but we have no idea who it is and what actually happened. “It provokes questions about the truthfulness of the ’document’, but also, inevitably, about time and history. In this case, ’history’ is a highly personal affair, encompassing rituals, intimate moments, and quotidian activities that make one person’s life story what it is.” ¹¹ The once passive actor (for the photographed object does not have too many chances to influence the final shot) tailored the past to her own desires and gave it her own form. Generally speaking, history is always conditioned by a particular explanation, and there are no “true” histories – even if some of them are captured in photographs.

A mediated view into different space-and-time sphere is Milena Dopitová’s series Everything Returns because It Wanders. The artist presents delightful, perfect objects – tea, coffee and dining sets and dishware, all produced in the past, but physically present in the future. Part of the installation are voices – recorded snatches of intimate discussions revolving around the everyday turnabouts of people of different generations: a child and a mother, a man and a woman, two men…, who once indeed might have used all those cups, saucers and plates. “Places abundant with beautiful things as well as their own history fascinate me outright and I, in my mind, always keep wondering who could have owned this particular splendid item and what could have been happening while it was in use. Such an atmosphere almost equals an unfinished story, subtle humour, sadness, weirdness, a need for love at every age… – all that we know from life. And at the same time, it is about some kind of dividing line between the present and the past. About the extent to which things seem to repeat in our lives, about what society is about now and how relationships, often even amongst the closest people, changed.” ¹² And Dopitová further develops her explorations of passing time. The inevitability of Death is halted by the steady presence of objects used by their original owners. Barthes identified his mother in the photographs with the help of objects that once surrounded her and outlived her death. Milena Dopitová’s objects have received their lost past. Familiar opinion can be found in the work Family Album by Ágnes Eperjesi. The artist guides us through the essential events of her life, introducing us to her grandparents, the first encounter of her parents, her birth and her life until the age of 18, when she became independent, and so on... The photographs are further explained by brief captions. In other words, this is a totally average sample of millions of similar samples of the same kind. But alas – the album presented is nothing but a fiction, consisting of small recycled photographs which can be found on various kinds of wrappings and other advertising material. Some time ago, Eperjesi realized the measure to which they were elaborated and that they were basically just disposed of items. But still, the album is truthful in a sense – the stylized pictures allow us to confront our personal experiences with the clichés discreetly imposed upon us by society. “This is a collection that allows me to reflect on my emotions and connections to various members of my family from a certain distance. As when perusing someone else’s album, we see the faces of strangers that somehow appear familiar. It is like discovering one’s own life through the life of someone else. And this is exactly what happens here.” ¹³

Filip Hladký’s excursions to the world of children are attentive observations of their sacrosanct space as well as digging for his own memories. In the series Milk Era, Hladký deals with the time around pre-school, from growing up to losing one’s milk teeth. His children’s models appear as if set to an unknown space which they did not chose and which they almost do not influence, form and change – they solely move within it and learn to know it. We suddenly realize how many significant perceptions we absorbed in that period of clear observation, when we did not bother either by empathy or exaggerated visions of our future brilliant career and the urge to judge and moralize. When we ourselves become parents, we again enter the time of play and peculiar (magic) thoughts. The problem usually is that this time is not altogether ours any more. It should be intimately known to us, we have experienced all that – but we sense that we stand on the other side. We vaguely recollect our distant feelings, and joys of our children reflect themselves in our memories. We, however, cannot look at the world with the same eyes and we are maybe more able to put ourselves into the shoes of our parents in those bygone days than to our children’s… Whether the viewer is a parent or not, the world in the photographs by Filip Hladký not only touches him or her by the potential possibility of intermediate entering somebody’s milk era, but mainly by the reconstructions of our own long forgotten “milk age”.

A relatively frequent element in contemporary art is incorporating old photographs into new wholes. Equally as with many other artists, this principle of appropriation was applied by Dušan Skala. His film, entitled The Tape, draws from collections and inheritances of his family. Skala used several discovered 8mm films to compose a fictive story carried by sentiment, sensation and nostalgia. Giving a vivid picture of something long gone always evokes a certain dismal feeling – the things that were have not existed for a long time. Although Skala’s film is rather a sensational spectacle, an associative play, it has two actors whom we accompany on their various journeys and observe them during festive as well as totally commonplace situations. These scenes alternate with other fragments and events which are very slightly interconnected. We can guess (did the two have children together?), inquire, or solely get carried away by the atmosphere of music, which is as fundamental in the film as the visual component. Skala’s collage also includes various other sounds, for example the singing of humpback whales. The author at the same time was not afraid of using trivial scenes, and even though his story is rather a disquieting adventure, it does not lack humour and hyperbole. “It is important to maintain a certain puzzling high sight in film.“ ¹⁴

Although the works by Jan Freiberg and by the author’s couple Kateřina Držková and Daniela Matějková developed alongside different paths, they resulted in a similar solution which can be described as “sociological” explorations with a certain overstatement. Yet another shared element here is suppressing one’s own authorship, which, de facto, occurs on a level of concept in both works. Jan Freiberg prepared a screening May I Have This Dance? for the festival, which will be on display on the façade of the Kolín Municipal Social House in the Zámecká Street every evening. Mesmerized by its brutalist architecture, he decided to present photographs reflecting the time of origin of the Kolín “house of culture”, i.e. the 1970s. The given normalization period altogether clearly demarcated public life, and the circle of family thus became the only remaining free space of self-realization for many people. Screening of the events of that period from a distance of more than thirty years represents a slight reminder and thought-provoking signal to reflect on the nonsensicality as well as the meaningfulness of various events occurring both in the public and private sphere. Due to the fact that Freiberg addressed the local citizens and collected period documents, he shifted his project onto the level of professional research.

Kateřina Držková and Daniela Matějková went even further. The point of departure of their work entitled The Kolín Family was the idea of a collective memory once shared by a certain community and the attempt to bring it back to the present via family photographs from personal archives of the inhabitants of Kolín. The two authors asked a good deal of them to lend group photographs – a family one, from cr?che, nursery school or elementary school, from the Spartakiads, weddings, funerals, fellowship gatherings and so on – and used the collected material to compose a single large-dimensional photograph. Their work is close to the projects by Kateřina Šedá who, however, focuses on initiating a contemporary collective experience. Solidarity can be best developed on the basis of a shared experience – and the resulting group photography, composed “chronologically” (albeit not after the time of origin of the individual shots, but after the age of the depicted people), can be marked as exactly the moment when the Kolín inhabitants come to realize their past. It is a certain confirmation of a shared idea of the course of history. The project nevertheless also has general validity. If the authors extended their projects to the scope of the whole republic, the result would most probably be similar Group Portraits with the only difference being – the size of the particular site.

The solo work exhibited by Daniela Matějková is a playful probe into the innards of an apartment house. Everybody who ever stood at the entrance of a house and tried to decipher the names on the bells has certainly sometime wondered who was behind them: what do the Johnsons look like, if Mr Smith and Mrs Otis are partners or student flatmates, whether Mr Franklin is a widower or confirmed bachelor… Especially thought-provoking are bizarre and exotic names or even monograms. In her series Kloboučnická Street no. 18, Daniela simply replaced the names with photographs of real people – sometimes by a detail of the face, another time by a view into the interior. If we ring the bell, the usual intercom crackling is moreover replaced by a short recorded sound that is characteristic of the inhabitants of the given apartment. There have been occasional voices warning against the excessive anonymity of city life. But, although all people living in one neighbourhood or in one street surely cannot know each other, a momentary look at these visual bells helps us become at least a bit orientated in who our neighbours actually might be.

A specific project is the continuously developed work by Dita Pepe, who focuses on staged photography, using methods characteristic of fashion photography and happening. In her Self-Portraits (initially taken with women, then men and finally children and men), she stylizes herself into the looks and expressions that correspond with the lifestyle and social status of the people with whom she poses. It is an enthralling play on identity seeking and identifying oneself with various points on the scale of values.

The project Family Maps, realized by Jana Štěpánová and Gabriela Kontra, gives an unbiased view of the variability of the contemporary family. It presents mutually corresponding portraits of several families with whom the artists – Jana in Berlin and Gabriela in Prague – spent some time, and were thus able to become closely familiar with the relationships among their particular members in their intimate home environment. The series mainly consists of snapshots capturing the most commonplace everyday situations, accompanied by short information about the depicted actors which illustrate how the families perceive themselves. Although the authors do not attempt to make objective social testimony or research, their photographs suggest how wide the concept “family” is today and to what extent its “traditional” model has disintegrated, regardless of geographical specifics: for the situation in Prague and Berlin practically do not differ in this aspect.

As it is apparent from the previously mentioned series, the concept of family in contemporary art is extraordinarily wide. Probably most daring among the exhibited works is the project or, respectively, a record of an event, realized by Anetta Mona Chişa and entitled Planet Romance. The artist contacted “a dating agency for women, which mediates husbands from the West to East-European women. After entering my personal data and information to the database of women, I now wait for the reactions of those interested and at the same archive the entire communication“. ¹⁵ If we agree with the thesis that contemporary art is a type of communication with the outside world, the approach selected by the artist then represents one of a few possible ways for drawing society’s attention to unpopular and tabooed subjects and undermining its stereotypes. During the preparation of the catalogue, the project was yet unfinished and the artist herself was curious about its final form.

Loosely associated with the subject of the festival is the work by Zuzana Blochová and Dita Lamačová, entitled Persona. “Persona is a document about a fictive individual. Its appearance is a harmonic mean of our own appearances. Its emotionless expression and its indefinite, evasive character and confusing looks were in part given by the necessity to strike an exact pose and by the features that predominate in the respective of us under certain angles. It is a kind of play with identity.“ ¹⁶ The realization of the series was preceded by a precise examination and measuring the physical and facial proportions of both artists. Playing with resemblance here is somehow reminiscent of comparing the likenesses between full sisters or a father and son in different photographs. Depending on the expression and the angle of gaze, it becomes apparent that one’s appearance is harder to define than we would assume. The project gave birth to a non-existent entity whose physiognomy is a harmonic mean of the physiognomies of the two artists who tried to present Persona in poses demonstrating their most characteristic features. The remarkably confusing Persona’s looks indeed make us wonder whether we are looking at one or two (or even more) people and, in the latter case, whether they are blood-related or if their affinity is purely imaginary and based on visual likeness. During the Kolín festival, the work will be exhibited in public space – four large-dimensional photographs will be displayed on the façade of the house land-registry no. 23 and the remaining shots along with the documentation will be situated in its shop windows.

A specific homage to the avant-garde photographer who gave the Kolín festival its name was prepared by Milan Mikuláštík and Jan Nálevka. Although the artists often present themselves separately, this time they act as an artistic couple called MINA, which perhaps dates as far back as to the times of their studies. They both work with various materials and artistic means, sometimes also with video and photography. The latter media were, for example, used in their Breton series of shots from a photographic performance, entitled “Tradition of Verticality”, and in the video “Puzzled Identity”, based on computer-processed photographs. This time, the artists again played with a computer, although in a slightly different way. The Kolín project Funke You! departs from the simple computer operation known as “search” and it presents faces of people found after entering the name “Funke”. The subsequent questions and conclusions evoked by this mystification are an inseparable part of the show.

Helena Musilová, Jolana Havelková, Naďa Kovaříková