Though Jan Svoboda expressed himself through photography, he rejected the label “photographer” and considered himself an artist in general. His work was created in close contact with painters and sculptors from the late 1950s to the late 1980s, and it profoundly influenced the next generation of photographers. It is characterised by an unprecedented lyrical sensitivity, precision, and an inward-looking concern with artistic problems. In the history of Czech photography, it is progressive, yet solitary and difficult to classify. In the form and content of his works, Svoboda tested the means and possibilities of photography. The self-reflexive critique of the medium, which he arrived at independently of contemporary conceptual tendencies, foreshadowed the development of photography on an international level. Although he was ahead of the global trend, his name is still not sufficiently established in the history of world photography.[1]
Svoboda was a romantic and saw art as a tool for self-expression. He came to the medium gradually and as a photographer was an autodidact. In his youth he tried his hand at poetry, and this is a quality evident in his later photographs. The subject matter of his early work reveals his fascination with ordinary, everyday objects and his search for archetypes. Parallels can be found in the work of Josef Sudek, whom Svoboda met in 1958. In his photographs from the first decade of his career, there are images of classical still lifes – eggs, pears, garlic, stones, but also fragments of landscapes, village gear, interiors and sculptures, all interconnected by his ingenious manipulation of light and composition. In the early years, the search for existential feeling was a fundamental theme, as well as his relationship to abstract expressionism (e.g. the series Kamen / Stones; Melancholy, 1963, Povrch / Surface, 1967). In the 1960s, in addition to several portraits, he also created a unique series of nudes (especially Triptych – Vlna, Krajina, Zátoka / Triptych – Wave, Landscape, Cove, 1964) depicting quite personal intimacy (the model was Svoboda’s second wife Anna Horáčková, later Svobodová). The artist presents the female body or fragments thereof in an abstract lyricism of an emotional nature, placing tenderness before sensuality. Parallels can be found in Svoboda’s friend, the painter Stanislav Podhrázský, whose works Svoboda also reproduced photographically.
In the 1940s and 1950s, while Josef Sudek had anachronistically switched to a graphic form of the positive by means of pigment prints on sheets of handmade paper, and in the 1960s had arrived at the artistic adaptation of photographs in the form of multi-material Puřidla a Veteše, Svoboda’s originality in the presentation of the positive was based from the very start on the status of the work as an image in its matter and surface. For Svoboda, the photograph-image was not the reproducible output of a technical apparatus, but a three-dimensional object in its own right. “The viewer is forced to perceive [Svoboda’s] photography as sui generis, as an object, not as an illusion,” writes Antonín Dufek.[2] In the context of the exhibition photographs of the time, which until the late 1960s and early 1970s usually stuck to the pre-war format of 30 × 40 cm and were framed in glass, this was a revolutionary approach.
For his photographic works, Svoboda invented an adjustment whereby he glued the enlargement onto a firm support (hardboard or cardboard), which he then reinforced from behind with a metal rod. This allowed the photographs to be hung in such a way that they stood out slightly from the wall. On the front, which was not covered with glass, he often included his signature and inscribed the date, following the example of painters. However, Antonín Dufek has pointed out that this may be a practice related to the production of advertising banners for shop windows, something Svoboda had experience of due to his employment.[3] In order for the photographic works to achieve the status of original images, Svoboda even destroyed some of his negatives. In his peak period, from the late 1960s onwards, he created enlargements, some in excess of one metre, and he consistently chose photographic paper with regard to its surface.[4] This object-based approach to photography logically increased the price Svoboda demanded for his works[5], but the reward was a complex viewing experience that absorbed the actual environment (space, light) into the image.
An important starting point of Svoboda’s work was his contact with the Prague art scene and his detachment from photographic circles. His first exploration of fine art took place at the Higher School of Art Industry in Prague, from which he graduated in 1954, specialising in scenic design. As he was interested in art history, he subsequently applied to the Prague Faculty of Arts, as evidenced by an invitation to the admissions proceedings preserved in his estate.[6] Although a successful draughtsman, he enlisted for two years of military service and married his classmate and painter Julia Oberding (1933–1998). After returning from the army, he learned how to express himself with a camera in their Prague apartment and Julia’s studio. Already then, in addition to still lifes, he was focusing on the nearby industrial landscape. The choice of photography as the medium in which he worked subsequently caused Svoboda difficulties in his commissioned work, as he had no photographic training and was not admitted as a candidate to the Union of Visual Artists until 1969.
Svoboda began his search for himself as artist within the context of his employment as a promotional graphic designer in several socialist enterprises (Stavoprojekt, Sovětská kniha and Obuv Praha). He practiced photography in his spare time, but by the 1960s, despite the lack of official permission, he was already working as a professional. His first client was his high school classmate, the sculptor Aleš Veselý, who invited him to document the exhibition Confrontation II (1960) and subsequently his own work, exhibitions and studio. Another classmate from school who commissioned work from Svoboda was Jan Švankmajer (1962), though he also collaborated with Emil Radok (1964) and Václav Cigler. Other clients-friends came from the Máj 57 group, which Svoboda and his wife Julie joined before the group’s last exhibition in 1964 (Stanislav Podhrázský, Zbyněk Sekal and Zdeněk Palcr among others). Veselý began an intensive personal collaboration with several other sculptors, notably Zdeněk Palcr, Stanislav Kolíbal, Zbyněk Sekal and Miloš Chlupáč (an order for photographs for his ultimately unpublished book Pojednání o plastica; 1966). His collaboration with the magazine Výtvarné umění (1965–1970), for which he documented the work of František Pacík, Martin Reiner, Olga Karlíková and Václav Boštík, in addition to several of the aforementioned artists, also brought him into close contact with the work of other artists. In 1971, already as a young award-winning artist, he was employed as a photographer at the Museum of Decorative Arts (until 1983), where what had been up till then his creative insight into the works of other artists was stifled by the routine work.
A turning point in the development of Svoboda’s work came with his first solo exhibition at the Galerie na Karlově náměstí, which took place a few weeks after Czechoslovakia was invaded by forces of the Warsaw Pact in 1968. The exhibition, organised and introduced by Anna Fárová, marked the beginning of the peak period of Svoboda’s work, which lasted until approximately 1972, when the majority of his most important works were created. Fárová’s role was pivotal – she pulled Svoboda out of his domestic cloister and took the risk of inviting a photographer to an art gallery. Svoboda seized the opportunity and invited Stanislav Kolíbal to install the exhibition and Zbyněk Sekal to edit the catalogue. The radical nature of the installation, with dry leaves on the ground, photographs installed in various groups and rhythms, without glazing or in space, whose subjects touched on the everyday, although their execution was exclusive, evoked the appropriate response. In the end, the installation had four reprises introduced by other theorists.[7]
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[8]). 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”.[9] 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”.[10] The artist’s means are minimal and simple, but the inner message of his works was unparalleled in photography at the time.
The basis of Svoboda’s work was his relationship to the artistic tradition that more or less consciously influenced him. His relationship to avant-garde photography is obvious – Dufek recalled Jaromír Funke in particular, while Anna Fárová mentioned his study of the magazines Volné směry and Minotaure with the photographers Man Ray, Brassaï and Štyrský.[11] Svoboda’s affiliation with Josef Sudek, oft remarked upon, was not straightforward, and their work was based on different principles. [12] Nonetheless, Svoboda reflects on Sudek in his work and pays explicit homage to him (the series Photographs by Josef Sudek, 1969–1973). In addition to his undisguised admiration and study of Cézanne’s work (through black-and-white reproductions),[13] which manifested itself in references and in the very basis of Svoboda’s work, he was also influenced by the contemporary Czech art scene, especially the work of the artists whose works he reproduced on commission (Stanislav Kolíbal, Zdeněk Palcr, Stanislav Podhrázský, Aleš Veselý).
One of the important principles that characterised Svoboda’s internally coherent work was the intimate experience of his own reality and the almost meditative aspect of the process of creating individual images. “In terms of disposition, Svoboda is a Don Quixote type of romantic artist who is unwilling to accept the mundane reality of life and creates his own autonomous inner world,” wrote Petr Balajka a year before Svoboda’s death.[14] Most of the works were created in the artist’s own apartment (which he and his wife Anna visually modified for this very purpose), in the photographic studio of the Museum of Decorative Arts, and in artists’ studios in the case of commissioned works. His work mirrors the reduction of expressive means to a minimum, even though Svoboda himself emphasised that he is not a minimalist, but a realist and romantic.[15] The objects in his immediate surroundings often represented a recurring theme of memories, especially of childhood and home. He therefore passed through the state’s ideological censorship unscathed and was able to sell his photographs to various institutions. His irritation with photography was so internal, contemplative and theoretical that it was sometimes hardly comprehensible even to Svoboda’s entourage, and his provocation was addressed primarily to the medium itself.
In 1975, Svoboda had an unprecedented retrospective of his almost twenty years of work at the Moravian Gallery in Brno (Sudek, who was still alive at the time, had a similar exhibition only a year later), which was supported by the critic and theorist Antonín Dufek, who provided the catalogue. The Moravian Gallery subsequently bought some of Svoboda’s photographs and was donated others, the prices of which were at that time comparable only to the works of classics such as Funke or Drtikol.[16] By this time, Svoboda had begun to experience various personal problems (stomach surgery, depression, a short stay in psychiatry, alcoholism, relationship problems), but his fame was still spreading. It was reflected, for example, in the admiration he received from the students of the recently established first department of photography at FAMU in Prague, and by the inclusion of his work in the “Fotografii elementarnej” circle of the Polish theorist Jerzy Olek in the 1980s. This was followed somewhat later by the concept of Czech “non-photography” propounded by the theorists Pavel Vančát and Jan Freiberg.[17]
The myth of Svoboda’s artistic genius was helped by the fact that he was given a solo exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery in London in 1982 (with a reprise at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford in 1983). This was made possible thanks to the generous support of Antonín Dufek and the Moravian Gallery in Brno, which was unprecedented among photographers in Czechoslovakia. Although his name was not known abroad, in retrospect this exhibition was of major importance. Among other things, it became the basis for the acquisition of Svoboda’s works by foreign collectors, mainly private collectors to begin with. Although Svoboda was perceived as a photographer in his own country, he also received recognition on the fine art scene (especially his notebook monograph in Jazzová sekce;[18] in the 1990s, thanks to Jaromír Zemina, he was exhibited in the National Gallery).
In 2005, the Moravian Gallery in Brno purchased his entire estate, including archival materials from the artist’s widow, thus making Svoboda’s work accessible to a wider public. New projects are gradually building on various aspects of his work that have already been uncovered and allow for further exploration of selected chapters or fragments of Svoboda’s photography. Outcomes included the exhibition Jan Svoboda: I’m Not a Photographer in 2015 (Moravian Gallery in Brno), and important international presentations, for example Jan Svoboda: Against the Light at the Photographers’ Gallery in London (2020).
The attractiveness of Svoboda’s work continues to reside in its intense reflection upon simple themes, while its impressiveness is enhanced by the formats he selected and its objective presentation. However, the meditation of their surfaces and tonalities is now unfortunately also affected by the ageing of the materials, which no longer possess the visual qualities they did when created, and is also disturbed by galleries’ habit of exhibiting historical photographs under Plexiglas, a mode of presentation that is at odds with the artist’s vision.
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[1] For foreign parallels see Pavel Vančát, Jan Svoboda, Prague: Torst, 2011; Pavel Vančát, Jan Svoboda: Obrazy fotografie, in: Jiří Pátek – Rostislav Koryčánek (eds.), Jan Svoboda: Nejsem fotograf, Brno: Moravská galerie v Brně, 2015, 2–19.
[2] Antonín Dufek, [untitled], in: Antonín Dufek – Jana Teplá (eds.), Jan Svoboda, fotografie. Výstava k nedožitým šedesátinám autora / Jan Svoboda, photographs. An Exhibition Commemorating the Late Photographer’s Sixtieth Birthday (exh. cat.), Brno: Moravská galerie v Brně – Praha: Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, 1994, 3–7, cit. p. 4.
[3] Antonín Dufek, Zápas Jana Svobody s fotografickými institucemi ve čtyřech dějstvích, in: Jiří Pátek – Rostislav Koryčánek (eds.), Jan Svoboda: Nejsem fotograf, Brno: Moravská galerie v Brně, 2015, 20–25.
[4] Petr Balajka, Jan Svoboda, Praha: Odeon, 1991, 10.
[5] For an analysis of photography prices, see Jiří Pátek, Krok za krokem. Vstup díla Jana Svobody do sbírky fotografie Moravské galerie v Brně / Step by step: The Acquisition of Works by Jan Svoboda for the Photography Collection in the Moravian Gallery in Brno, in: Jiří Pátek, Jan Svoboda. Dílo ve sbírkách Moravské galerie v Brně / Jan Svoboda: Work in the Collections of the Moravian Gallery in Brno, Brno: Moravská galerie v Brně, 2020, 75–89.
[6] Pavel Vančát – Katarína Mašterová, Biografie, in: Jiří Pátek – Rostislav Koryčánek (eds.), Jan Svoboda: Nejsem fotograf, Brno: Moravská galerie v Brně, 2015, 234–151, cit. p. 236.
[7] The exhibition was analysed by Terezie Nekvindová, Jan Svoboda. Fotografie, in: Pavlína Morganová – Terezie Nekvindová – Dagmar Svatošová, The Exhibition as Medium: Czech Art 1957–1999, Prague: VVP AVU, 2020, 432–443.
[8] Attention was drawn to the photography by P. Vančát 2015, see fn. 1.
[9] Antonín Dufek, Jan Svoboda: Fotografie / Photographs (exh. cat.), Ministerstvo kultury ČSSR, 1982, 9.
[10] Jaroslav Anděl, Jan Svoboda – exhibition retrospectives, Revue fotografie XIX, 1975, no. 3, 74
[11] Dufek 1994 (fn. 2), 3; Anna Fárová, Jan Svoboda. Fotografie (exh. cat.), Praha [Galerie na Karlově náměstí], 1968, unpag.
[12] Zdeněk Kirschner, Komparace I. Fotografie Josefa Sudka a Jana Svobody (exh. cat.), Roudnice nad Labem: Galerie výtvarného umění v Roudnici nad Labem – Praha: Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, 1983.
[13] See also Jaroslav Anděl, Reprodukovatelnost valérů: Jan Svoboda a paradox modernistické fotografie, in: Jiří Pátek – Rostislav Koryčánek (eds.), Jan Svoboda: Nejsem fotograf, Brno: Moravská galerie v Brně, 2015, 20–25.
[14] Petr Balajka, Jan Svoboda, Praha: Odeon 1991, 43. The text is from 1989.
[15] Petr Balajka, Jan Svoboda – rozhovor k pětapadesátinám autora, Revue fotografie XXXIII, 1989, no. 3, 24–33, cit. p. 28.
[16] Pátek 2020, see fn. 5.
[17] Pavel Vančát – Jan Freiberg (eds.), Fotografie?? / Photography?? (exh. cat.), Klatovy: Galerie Klatovy / Klenová, 2004.
[18] Karel Srp, Jan Svoboda: fotografie, Situace 7 (supplement to the bulletin Jazz), Praha: Jazzová sekce Svazu hudebníků, 1980.
