Obraz, který se nevrátí III.

Svoboda’s success provoked him to even greater artistic gestures – his photographs became larger, he focused on tiny episodes of vision (the subject becomes the light itself, e.g. S přílivem modravým / With the Blue Tide, 1968; Modrý obraz / The Blue Image, 1972), and revelled in cycles that dealt with highly artistic problems of tonality and shades of photographed reality, or with the meticulously thought-out composition and space of the image (e.g. the cycles of numbered photographs Pokus o ideální proporci / Attempt at Ideal Proportion; Polovina / Half; Předobraz / Pre-image; Obraz, který se nevrátí / The Image That Will Not Return; Stůl / The Table). In addition to the archetypal subjects he had previously favoured, he introduced into his photographs ephemeral elements (light, flowers, salt, objects lying around his own apartment), spiritual references (in the form of quotations from the work of other artists, which replaced the religious statuettes photographed in his early work) and references to his models (he depicted mainly Cézanne’s reproductions or books about him and his library), which led to the increasingly frequent insertion of his own photographs into new photographs (for the first time Interiér III, Hrušky / Interior III, Pears, 1968 at the 1968 exhibition). A fierce doubt regarding photography, which dominated Svoboda’s feelings, also permeated the work. The construction of the photographic image by means of value, which became the projection surface of the work’s content and message, was key for him. According to Antonín Dufek, Svoboda’s photographs are “peculiar objects that represent rather than depict reality”. They can be compared to a painter’s canvas rather than a mechanically based photograph. Jaroslav Anděl, for his part, said of Svoboda’s work that “photography realises its ancient dream and achieves an autonomous artistic image”. The artist’s means are minimal and simple, but the inner message of his works was unparalleled in photography at the time.