In her long-term photographic projects, Dita Pepe deals primarily with women living in contemporary society. She approaches the topic as an investigative documentary filmmaker who systematically looks at socio-cultural issues related to identity and gender, including her own. She sees the medium of photography as a form of communication and therapy – she communicates with the people she captures in her photographs not only as a photographer, but above all as a person ready to share her vulnerability: she often features as a protagonist in her own projects.
Her best-known and most comprehensive collection, Autoportréty / Self-Portraits (1999–2014), presents autobiographically oriented, staged photographs that highlight the central role of background in an individual’s life: their personal identity changes dramatically in relation to the other people and diverse circumstances. First there was Autoportréty se ženami / Self-Portraits with Women. A few years later, Pepe appears in photographs as the partner of men (Autoportréty s muži / Self-Portraits with Men), before concluding the project with family portraits, where she places her two daughters in the role of fictional offspring. Spanning the social strata, locations and lifestyles of her protagonists, she becomes a punk, a companion, a grandmother, a village woman with three children… On one occasion she is the wife of a wealthy businessman on a shopping trip, on another she poses in front of a tent surrounded by rubbish with her homeless partner and their dog. Whether she enjoys riding horses, going on hikes or listening to music, she embraces the various values of her loved ones’ lives and blends into the most typical corners of their homes. She uses the techniques of fashion photography in composing her shots, but through the precision of her styling she achieves very authentic visual testimonies. This series, for which she received the Personality of Czech Photography Award in 2012, also tries to reflect on the relativity of life’s journeys, as well as the plurality of stories connected with people and how easily they can be influenced by randomness.
Around 2008, Pepe began collaborating with the documentary filmmaker and publisher Barbora Baronová on the project Slečny / Misses (2008–2012), a stylised literary documentary oscillating between oral history, non-fiction and fiction, consisting of the stories of eight women who decided not to get married. We learn that Markéta has been in a happy relationship with a married man for 30 years, while Eliška is the epitome of a fragile, lonely woman. Pepe captures the women with a large-format camera in sensitive portraits that she combines with images from their homes. The photographs lose their staged quality and take on a meditative character, while at the same time openly forcing the viewer to reflect on the concept of the female role within the context of historical changes and the mindset of Czech society. The project is then loosely linked to the 2015 series Japonské ženy (Současné Japonsko evropskýma očima) / Japanese Women (Contemporary Japan through European Eyes), which deals with the topic in the Japanese cultural climate, where unmarried women are perceived as inferior. Like all of Dita Pepe’s subsequent projects, Japanese Women is produced in collaboration with Barbara Baronová.
The projects Měj ráda sama sebe / Love Yourself (2014) and Intimacy (2012–2015) develop ideas already outlined in Self-Portraits. Love Yourself seeks to approach the personal philosophy of women with different life conditions and to highlight the belief that in order to love others, one should first accept and love oneself. Pepe and Baron document the visual transformation of women, where the experience of a photo shoot (in this case, a photo shoot with a makeup artist) can trigger the sitter to start thinking differently about themselves. The whole book builds on a therapeutic approach to the medium of photography. Intimacy focuses more on the problems associated with changes in social status in a woman’s life. These can occur under the influence of illness, distressing circumstances or disability. The book describes in detail relationships, situations or stories (we follow, for example, the story of Betynka, a former train dispatcher on the Ostrava-Bohumín line, who at the age of fifty began to consume her own body), and is accompanied by visually clean, stylised photographs in which – following the example of previous projects – the artist herself appears. Another layer of the project involves archival material: scraps from diaries, pictures and memoirs. The therapeutic approach to photography and working with archival material is also applied in her most comprehensive, artistic-scientific project to date, Hranice lásky / Boundaries of Love (2016–2021), which was created as part of her doctoral thesis at the Tomas Bata University in Zlín.
Dita Pepe’s artistic work is characterised by an emphasis on humanity and a strong narrative, which is often visually stylised with authorial inputs in the form of self-portraits. In her documentary projects, Pepe unwaveringly explores the diversity of life journeys against the backdrop of people from different socio-geographical backgrounds, patiently listening to them and never judging them. She often uses the expressive means of staged fashion photography combined with the classical documentary tradition in order to explore these ideas, though her focus remains on the female subject and the Socratic desire to get to know oneself through others.
