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‹ Photo Notes · 15 ledna, 2012
I have been thinking about what to actually write about the year 2011 that has just ended. When I shot the first pictures in January a year ago, I had a feeling that things weren’t going well, that it wasn’t quite a happy start. After the relatively successful year 2010 it wasn’t entirely pleasant, but everything turned around very quickly and 2011 prepared a lot of interesting surprises for me.
Last year was more successful than I expected. As expected, though, it also meant far more work and less time. I’m not complaining, I do what I enjoy and what I have chosen, and I’m glad that I have more and more reasons to continue in this work.
Compared with the aforementioned 2010, in which I took part in many exhibitions, 2011 was focused more on publishing. During the year I worked on six books in total, three of which came out, two should be published in the coming months and one probably never will be.
Originally just for a laugh, at the beginning of the year I started to devote myself to 3D photography, and in the end I shot for 3D at almost every shoot, besides the two-dimensional pictures.
In the middle of the year I decided on a partial return to classic, analogue photography. I say partial because I don’t plan to abandon digital photography; technology keeps moving forward, and each of these ways of photographing offers different possibilities, different results and a different experience, both of the view and of the process itself. And because I enjoy the magic of imperfection, I acquired a beautiful collection of old medium-format cameras. All the instruments are functional, they offer various quality and atmosphere of the image, they have various smaller or larger flaws, and I photograph with all of them.
The mix of models I worked with during the year was interesting. Most of the year I shot with two wonderful models and friends I have already written about here. They were the Czech model Tereza (Metteorwa) and the Russian Viktoria. Besides these two constants I worked with many other models from the Czech Republic and various other countries, but predominantly from Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union (Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan etc.). The last shoot of 2011, the day before New Year’s Eve, was also with a Moscow model, Kristina. I can’t leave out two more models from the past year because of their exceptional nature. One of them is (again) the Russian model Ksenia, currently living in Prague, the other is called Francesca and in November she flew to Prague from Rome for 3 days. Both of them shocked me with their spontaneity and variety.
A list of everything that happened last year and can be regarded as a success would be long, boring and would sound boastful, so I’ll keep some things to myself. What I consider truly important is that I gained new friends, new experiences (I consider all of them good, even a bad experience is good), clarified many things for myself, including a list of things I want to clarify in the future, and so on. In short, I did not waste the year 2011 and I have a good feeling about it, even though I didn’t manage nearly everything and nearly everything didn’t turn out as I had wished.
And what about the new year 2012?
For me it begins on 4 January with the exhibition Feminae, organized under the auspices of the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Portugal at the Fábrica Braço de Prata gallery in Lisbon.
In the near future I would like to finish a new version of this website, which will, among other things, be better optimized for mobile devices. At the same time I plan to move it to a new web hosting, because the current one is starting to have problems with the steadily growing traffic.
I won’t reveal the details of other plans for now, but I can assure you that I don’t intend to waste this year either.
I wish everyone a beautiful, successful and peaceful year 2012.