Before the 1990s, the cultural infrastructure in Czechoslovakia was limited and, although there were many fine art institutions, photography was not regarded as an art and was placed somewhere on the periphery. In 1990, there weren’t any commercial galleries. There was the Moravian Gallery in Brno and the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, which opened a photography department in the seventies and started collecting photography. Prior to this, photography was collected mainly by private individuals and the Czechoslovakian Press Agency, which has been collecting photography since its inception. Today, the Czech Press Agency licences images from its photography and film library. With regard to this situation, a group of Czech photographers decided to set up an institution specialising in photography, as before 1989 there was none solely dedicated to the medium. The group would meet informally to share ideas and they later established a foundation, which I can compare with the International Centre of Photography (ICP) in New York founded by photographers who grouped around Cornell Cappa. The idea was to establish an institution where commercial demand did not play any role, and they succeeded. The foundation formerly named "Aktiv volne fotografie" (today Prague House of Photography) was formed in 1989.

The PHP is oriented towards exhibition, publishing, educational, networking and collecting activities whose goal, among others, is to promote exceptional local as well as international art projects and artists.

A special exhibition program of the PHP is devoted to the classic art photography heritage. It is supported by the Czech Ministery of Culture and the City of Prague and realized in collaboration with the state collections, such as the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague or the Moravian Gallery in Brno, and a number of foreign cultural institutions such as the Moscow House of Photography, Hungarian House of Photography, European House of Photography, FotoInstitute Netherlands, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, TX, etc. This program, truly international in scope, shows up such interesting artists as: František Drtikol, August Sander, Alexandr Rodchenko, André Kertész, René Burri, Raoul Hausmann, Weegee , P. Horst, Karel Teige, Aaron Siskind, Minor White, Edward Weston, …

A similar line in the PHP's exhibition program is formed by show series of contemporary, both local and foreign, photographers: Josef Koudelka, Ralph Gibson, Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Barbara Crane, Michal Rovner, Ernestine Ruben, Michael Kenna, Colin Gray, Keith Carter, Arthur Tress, Bill Brandt, Irwing Penn, Nan Goldin, Jan Saudek, Tono Stano, Sebastio Salgado, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton and many others.

The PHP collaborates with respected curators and art historians, on both conceptual and realizational levels.

To the foreign photographers, the PHP offers its own exhibition spaces in the very centre of Prague but, at the same time, it also collaborates with other galleries and museums in the Czech Republic. On the other hand, the current relations and contacts with the foreign photography and cultural institutions are being strenghtened and new ones created in order to make Czech photography more visible abroad.

One of the PHP's ambitions is to create a flexible platform for inter­generational communication, allowing students and young photographers to enter professional photography and public realm with less difficulty. From this perspective, an exceptional role is occupied by the annual show cycle entitled "New Names" that was launched in 1993. These shows search for new trends and approaches among beginning and yet unknown artists, as it happened, for instance, in the case of Veronika Bromová and Markéta Othová, both well respected artists today.

The Prague House of Photography has its own photographic collection which was founded in 1989. Since 1989, the PHP has collected fine art photography work of both classic and contemporary Czech and foreign photographers. The quality of selected works is expertly guaranteed by the PHP´s Board of Curators and Art Historians.

The Prague House of Photography located Haštalská street in Prague 1 was terribly flooded in August 2002. As a result of the flooding, the PHP had to abandon its permanent seat in Haštalská street and found a substitute space. Since September 2002 up to now, the PHP has been located at Wenceslas Square 31 in Prague 1, where the PHP has its temporary exhibition, depository and office space. In 2002, the PHP obtained a new space for its permanent seat. The City of Prague offered the PHP a large space in an old historical building in the very center of Prague. Unfortunately, the building was in a very poor condition. Therefore, complete restoration was necessary. The restoration began in March 2003 and it is not finished yet. If everything goes smoothly and well the PHP will open its new residence in Revoluční street  in Prague 1 this September. The festive opening is planned for Thursday, September 22^nd.

As well as heading up the PHP, I write and lecture on many aspects of Czech photography. Talking about Czech photography we need to take at least a brief look into the history and name some key personalities whose influence was the most significant. Let´s begin this brief overview with the early 20s and 30s of the past century. The most recognized representatives of the so-called "Golden Age" of Czech photography, known as the Czech Avant-Garde, are Frantisek Drtikol, Josef Sudek, Jaromir Funke, Alexander Hackenschmied, Eugen Wiskovsky and Jaroslav Rossler. These photographers' work can be found in many prestigious museums as well as private collections all around the globe.

These photographers' fine art work was, apart from other things, influenced by the fact that they made their living with advertising and studio portrait photography. They paid a lot of attention to forms and structures, and emphasized them by using extremely sharp artificial light. This kind of lighting is nowadays very trendy again.

Czech Avant-Garde photography represents the most important creative trends, movements and tendencies in progressive photography and photo-montage during the given period, from the picture poems produced by the artistic group Devětsil, from New Objectivity, Constructivism, Abstraction, and Socio-critical photography, to the Surrealist collages and photography of the 1930s and 1940s. The Czech Avant-Garde Photography as a whole, in its originality, scope and quality, has yet to receive the attention it deserves as part of the world visual culture and fine art heritage.

A phenomenon himself is Jan Saudek. He started from classic B&W photography, and then later switched to locally-coloured photography, using the Korean ‘Hin-Tin’ technique, which was so original at the time, and made him really famous. He was also one of the very few Czech artists from this time who did nude photography. A success both commercially and artistically, his work was shown abroad and reproductions of his distinctive photographs circulated widely. He shows obsessions, erotic life and nudity of humans. But they are shown in a visually aesthetic way. It was provocative as these subjects were still taboo in Czechoslovakia at the time.

The eighties and nineties produced a generation of photographers, including Tono Stano, Stephan Grygar, Ivan Pinkava, Vaclav Jirasek and Pavel Banka. The most significant of these two decades is that, unlike the prior eras, photographers were much more diversified in style, genre, language and technique.

These photographers presented a new, sophisticated approach to the so-called "visualism". Having evolved in the seventies, it was now taking shape. Drawing from the symbolism of the Czech Avant-Garde and modern surrealism of the twenties, thirties and forties, the importance of form as well as symbolic and visual expression was the priority. Photographers like Ivan Pinkava and Vaclav Jirasek are not only known for their fine art photography, they were also active in the field of advertising and portrait photography and surely formed the visual landscape of the time.

A remarkable artist is Pavel Banka. Pavel is someone that I highly respect as an artist, a human being and a friend. He’s been my mentor and has taught me almost everything I know about aesthetics of visual communication. He has a certain wisdom, as well as a great deal of experience and knowledge – he is one of the most distinguished Czech photographers in the field of world fine art photography today and has been experimenting with diverse techniques and approaches to the medium. During his lifetime, he has worked in portraiture and non-figurative photography, in both black and white and colour, and has been successful across different genres. He is also a master printer.

At present, Pavel is having a grand show at Musee de la Photographie in Charleroi in Belgium. Part of this show includes Pavel´s black and white series Infinity which enjoyed a highly successful opening in Gallery Rudolfinum in Prague in 2001 and is touring internationally. Represented by the Prague House of Photography, Infinity is made up of several cycles: "Hills and Meadows"; "Forestscapes"; "Seascapes" and "Skies". Pavel´s work uses a very minimalist, visually intimate and powerful approach to the subject. His photographs look more like paintings. Pavel uses extremely long exposures (the longest is 4-hour exposure) to reach the visually minimalist rendering. It’s a similar process to the work of Michael Kenna or Hiroshi Sugimoto but the actual prints are much larger. Pavel is also working on an on-going series of expressive and intimate, colour portraits Mothers and Daughters, which he began in black and white in the eighties and returned to in 2001. I think Pavel has got a kind of so-called female optics and perception, not so typical of a male photographer. He not only sees things, he perceives them deeply. Pavel discovers a real beauty of very ordinary things around us. And moreover, he pays his attention to tiny little details which are usually invisible for most of us.

Another remarkable protagonist of the 80s and 90s, Tono Stano, became very successful worldwide. Tono Stano has always been a big fan of Frantisek Drtikol. He absorbed the aesthetics of F. Drtikol´s modern nudes of the 20s and 30s and reinvented it within contemporary visual language. Tono Stano works mostly in the studio and uses, like the photographers in the 30s, the body language to celebrate its beauty.

Closing up the 90s and moving on to the present, we shall talk about the authors you can nowadays most commonly see in public press, the photojournalists and Czech Press or World Press Photo winners, like Jan Sibik, Andrej Bán and Tomki Nemec, who is well known for his photographs of the former Czech President Vaclav Havel. These photographers are widely published in the magazine "REFLEX" that focuses on journalistic photography. The cover pages of this very popular medium are usually shot by David Kraus, surely one of the most commercially successful portrait photographers you can find. All of them work with intense colors and speak a straight raw language, not manipulating reality.

Since the 1990s, there has been a marked shift in the field of documentary photography to what I call subjective documentary, which is a more conceptual and artistic form of the genre – one that focuses on the subject in differing ways using alternative aesthetics and approaches to that of the famous Czech humanistic and socially critical tradition.

The boundaries between contemporary fine art and documentary photography are disappearing. There is an evident growth in colour, ‘conceptual fine art’ and portrait photography, using medium-format cameras and new technologies. It appears that, in the Czech Republic, as in other countries, there is a notable dissolving of traditional and clear boundaries demarcating photography genres. The young generation of Czech photographers like Hynek Alt and Sasa Vajd, Vit Simanek, Sylva Francova or Barbora Kuklikova, who practise the new, subjective documentary and who apply conceptual approach, have established a bridge. The situation is more complex now as there is also installation, video art and mixed media which have also become art.

Keen to support and raise the profile of fresh talent, last year, the PHP, in collaboration with the Institute of Creative Photography of Silesian University in Opava, launched the Jaromir Funke Award - a tribute to the Czech Avant-Garde photographer. Called Young Blood, the award aims to give emerging Czech artists under 35 a helping hand in starting a professional career. Heralding a new generation of photographers, many of last year’s main winners are approaching the medium, particularly in terms of authorship, in different ways. Some of these authors, for example, Salim Issa and Stepanka Stein or Kamera Skura work under the so-called ‘collective signature’ which is quite a new phenomenon in the Czech Republic.

There is a ‘new breed’ of artists working with the medium which, among others, includes Veronika Bromova, Sylva Francova, Dita Pepe, Stepanka Stein and Salim Issa, Hynek Alt and Alexandra Vajd of Kamera Skura and Radeq Brousil. Growing up in the post-Soviet era with satellite TV, western advertising and consumer lifestyles, they have benefited from a newly-won freedom and, unlike their predecessors, they are no longer isolated. Able to travel more freely, they have access to contemporary world photography and visual culture from other places. With new technologies at their disposal, many of these photographers are using the digital world to question the veracity of the medium. These authors’ work is more conceptual and has a connection to contemporary fine arts as well as applied arts. Focused on new trends in the contemporary fine art world their work is without any stylistic limitations and is open to innovation, experiment and multi-disciplinarity.

Hynek Alt and Alexandra Vajd a Czech-Slovakian couple and artistic partnership, are one such example. Both completed their photography Masters at Film and TV Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) and are currently on a Fulbright fellowship in the United States. Their new series Man Woman (Unfinished) sees the couple take a dual position. Both in front of, and behind, the camera, the pair explores their relationship to photography, each other and space, in what Hodek refers to as conceptual approach. Coincidentally, their portrait by Czech photographer (NAME) taken in Cesky Raj was the front cover of the December/January 2003 issue of this magazine.

Putting greater emphasis on how the form supports the subject, many of these photographers use interactive media in creative and new ways. The collective Kamera Skura has also been making a name for itself, both at home and abroad. Their work is a stage-managed, both figurative and non-figurative, conceptual photography operating within a social and cultural context, in their own artistic way they are capturing contemporary trends, ikons, lifestyles and cultural tendencies of today's world.

One of the first winners of the Funke Award, Dita Pepe is gaining both local and international recognition. Hailing from a commercial and advertising background where she collaborated with her husband Petr Hrubes, in her Selfportraits series, Pepe puts herself in other people’s lives and stages colour portraits where she dresses up taking on the identity of another.

Since the Velvet Revolution, it also appears that photography concerning gender and ‘otherness’ has emerged and Czech women photographers and artists are now using the medium to explore questions of sexuality, gender and identity. The interest in looking at these issues in the Czech Republic is similar to the early days of the second wave of feminism which took place in the West in the seventies and eighties. After the Velvet Revolution, these issues became really hot in Czech society. This high interest arose from the long years of taboo during Communism. There was a lack of information related to sexuality, gender and identity in the society as there was a lot of censorship, discrimination, xeno- and social phobias.

One of the key figures of the ‘new wave’ in Czech visual art, many of whom completed their studies at the Academy of Film and Arts (FAMU) or the University of Applied Arts in Prague, Veronika Bromova has received critical acclaim both nationally and internationally and is regarded as a leading light in the field of Czech digitally-altered photography. From the mid to the late nineties, Bromova was part of a generation making up a strong female core of artists articulating concerns regarding sexuality and identity.

Her early work Views caused quite a stir when it was exhibited in 1996. She created large-scale photographs using herself as a model and computer manipulation to render the images similar to those found in medical anatomy textbooks. By the late nineties, Bromova was using three-dimensional objects and her recent installations combine photographs, objects and video projection. And in keeping with much of her oeuvre, her latest work Metamorphosis offers a critique of biological reductionism and essentialism.

The seamless, digitally-manipulated colour ‘panoramas’ of emerging photographer Sylva Francova, who studied under Bromova, also question gender but more in terms of assigned roles and expectations. Although departuring from her former teacher’s work, there is a parallel between her and her teacher´s work. Both artists are very familiar with new media, digital photography and video art and both experiment with diverse techniques and approaches to visual communication. And even though both artists focus on similar subjects, in my opinion, Francova’s work operates within a socio-cultural context much more than Bromova’s. Francova studied under Pavel Banka and was taught to work in all the various photographic genres, mainly portrait and documentary photography, which she combines and which influence each other in contemporary fine art photography today.

And so we come full circle. In the Czech Republic it appears that the long years of separation under the Communists have influenced us all, even more in such a tight community.

Our brief glance into the Czech world of photography today has proved enlightening and, though the changes made by the Velvet Revolution have had an enormous impact on the face of Czech photography in the last two decades, the impact of years of isolation cannot be ignored.

Many photographers, particularly young Czech women, seem to be using self-portraiture, or elements of it, as a way of articulating their ideas in ways reminiscent of Cindy Sherman’s work in the eighties. Positioning themselves as both model and photographer, it appears that this proliferation could be explained as a reaction to the emphasis placed on the group, rather than the individual experience, felt under Communism, while in other art markets, photographs of deserted buildings, abandoned swimming pools and empty spaces have long been present.