Lukáš Jasanský

Martin Polák (1966) and Lukáš Jasanský (1965) are an important artist duo on the field of photography in contemporary art in the Czech Republic as well as abroad. Their importance is primarily given by their specific conceptual approach to this media, which has opened up the path for its further development and had great influence on the production of photography in the sphere of free art. As curator and photography theoretician Pavel Vančát said, Polák and Jasanský pre-prepared the ground for the entrance of post-conceptual approach to photography that is distinguished by examining the media of photography by thematizing its position and use in artistic, social and other contexts. 
They met at the Secondary Technical School of Graphics in Prague where they studied Applied Photography. In both cases, their direction was definitely influenced by the fact that they came from families of photographers. It was already back then that they experienced a mutual creative understanding and their first cooperation on photographic assignments and school projects took place. They started to work together as an artistic duo in the mid 1980s, which was at the time that they both decided to continue studying at Prague’s FAMU (Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts in Prague), which they eventually achieved. At that time the canon of modernistic photography was prevailing at the Department of Photography at FAMU, with occasional post-modernistic tendencies (we can recollect the success of the Slovak New Wave), towards which Jasanský and Polák had deliberately delimited themselves already with their early cycles, or they directly reacted to it. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that they did not encounter great success on the school grounds and in the contemporary Czech artistic and photographic discursus. Things were different abroad where they started to penetrate already during their studies. One year prior to the Velvet Revolution, for example, they made it to the exhibition Young European Photographers Award in the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany. At this time they also had an important and inspirational connection to the artistic groups Tvrdohlaví (Headstrong) and BKS (Bude konec světa) (The End of the World Is Coming), which was demonstrated by their participation in the exhibition of Tvrdohlaví in the Gallery ULUV in 1989. We can only speculate about the fact who influenced whom in what way. But it is clear that these two artists were connected by their critical view of the social and political situation and the ridicule thereof, their fascination for kitsch and other elements. 
One of their first photographic series’, which was also one of the few presented at a school exhibition is Pragensie (1986-1990). This was a cycle of black and white negatives capturing the ordinariness and sort of “dullness” and silence in their views of houses, cars on the street, petro stations, but also of historical objects. In these images of high technical quality but deliberately banal content, we can recognize a specific style with which Jasanský and Polák have continued throughout their artistic career. They are reportages without content or situation, which give a meaning to reportage photography. As Tomáš Pospiszyl wrote in one of his texts: “The actual subject of the cycle was the ability of a photograph to record the ordinariness and simultaneously stereotype of reportage photo-journalism.” Most of their works are characteristic for capturing banalities, references to established laws and genres of photography and an adequate dose of irony and humour, as well as the collective cycle of usually large format negatives as their means of expression. This characteristic is also obvious in the thesis work – two photographic collections called Jokes and Reportage and Humanistic Photography (Vtipy a Reportážní a humanistická fotografie), with which they unsuccessfully ended their studies at FAMU. The theoretical part was evaluated as “unsatisfactory”. It contained a sort of typology of the most often used jokes as well as interviews with authors in which they asked themselves questions through a fictive figure. The series of Jokes where a short text is added to each photograph clearly reveals the already mentioned specific humour based on ordinariness and banality. The photographs depicted deliberately created and staged still life and they functioned as a sort of illustrative example of this or that joke. The second part of the thesis work, Reportages is in a sense a follow up to the previously mentioned Pragensie and once again it represents an effort of the artists to capture reality without action – to create some sort of absurd reportage in which the sense of this photographic genre is lost. This series also contains commentary about the everyday greyness of that time. The critical vertone is relatively unnoticeable; it does not scream out but it is strongly present under the layer of ironic tone. 
Another important characteristic of the photographic cycles of this duo is the fact that there is an important whole and the individual photographs cannot function well without the context of the others. Their way of working is based on a well thought out content of the photographed, subsequent collective photography, evaluation of the selection of individual shots for the final series’ and of course also the way of presentation, which depends on the context of the place as well as on the content of the message. It is therefore obvious that these two artists truly work as one and their view of reality is common and shared. There is no unifying theme among their chosen motives but some of them reoccur. The themes range from ordinariness and daily objects, through documentation of the activities of an individual, all the way to religious motives and the influence of religion in contemporary world. Here we can recall their early cycle Cemeteries (Hřbitovy) when they photographed tombstones on which they arranged various objects and branches as the remains of some religious ritual. The topic of religion projected in another way in the series Kościoły, kościoły from the year 2012 capturing postmodern church architecture in Poland, where the un-unified architecture form obscures its function for most of us and creates the impression of something unknown and unidentifiable. Another motive, which repeated in their work was the documentation of the life and activities of one person and in this case they also used quite different approaches. As the first example we can mention the series Director and Founder (Ředitel a zakladatel) (2011), when Polák and Jasanský created a sort of record of daily activities and obligations of the director of the cultural centre Sokol in the Polish regional town Nowy Sącz. In another example it was the cycle of photographs Jan Merta, which is made up of images of places that were fundamental and inspirational for the life and work of this artist. Here again I must refer to Tomáš Pospiszyl who states with respect to this: “The photograph here becomes a tool for retrogressive building of memory, artificially created archive of life’s pilgrimage where the invisible surface of things mingles with levels of hidden meanings.” This mingling appears to me as one of the most fundamental moments in all of their work. 
Most of the time we would search in vain for the presence of a person in the photographs of Polák and Jasanský. In spite of that, man is concealed here in the “history portrayed” as is the case in Jan Merta, but also in a more general sense in the references to human activities and influences. Also as art theoretician and curator Karel Císař, who has been interested in the work of Polák and Jasanský for a long time, states, the presence of man often appears here through the anthropomorphic character of buildings that can remind of the human face or a mask. One of the exceptions where the capturing of man is the cardinal element is in the series Men (Chlapi) (1989-1990), which once again deals with the creation of some sort of absurd archive with the typology of men in various age groups and social statuses at the end of the 1980s thanks to which we could assign this work as having a dehumanized or impersonal character.
The photographic cycles in which Polák and Jasanský capture buildings, individual architectonic elements, urban segments or automobiles and other objects , that recur, and hence create some typology and archive, can remind us of the production of Düsseldorf Photographic School. They differ from it with the previously mentioned specifics – irony, emphasis on banality or also their critical vertone, which is connected primarily to Czech photographic tradition, the Czech environment, society, culture and landscape. They show us the un-beautified and bare image of reality in which we live or lived.