Friday, June 02, 2006



"Ultimately, photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stignatizes but when it is pensive, when it thinks."
-roland barthes



LOVER OF FLESH
frantisek drtikol

Frantisek Drtikol was born in 1883 in Pribram, Czechoslovakia. He apprenticed at a portrait studio before attending in 1901 the Munich Lehr-Und Versuchsanstalt fur Photographie, a teaching and research institute.
Frantisek returned to Prague where he opened his own portrait studio, photographing artists and writers, and becoming very well known for it.
...a painter, Frantisek Drtikol contiuned to paint, making backdrops for his photographs. He was influenced by art Nouveau and in turn he was a influentual figure in the Bauhaus movement.



...experimental, expressive, Frantisek started to embrace the ideals of the art deco movement, began using cutouts and softness of lighting, dream like compositions. He was finding a new language. Taking this even further, in 1930 Frantisek stopped using models altogether amd began creating cutout figures that he inserted into his compositions.


"The eye is a great, beautiful chapter. And one that you never finish reading. I find that its range of expression keeps expanding, depending on how the sharpness of my own eye improves and how my empathy for other people deepens. The glint of an eye... A model once came to me: a gaunt, plain face, a thin body, but uncommonly pretty eyes - large and sad. I would have liked to place those eyes somewhere in a void, so they could live a completely separate life, so they could live through their sad beauty." - Frantisek Drtikol





I find Frantisek's photography heavy with sadness, l find beauty and thickness there but so alone.








In 1935 Frantisek gave up photography completely, returning to painting and philosophy. Drifting into obscurity he died lonely and forgotten in 1961.