A double exhibition showing the unusual concordance between the black-and-white and colour photographs of Jindřich Štreit and Vladimír Birgus.

curator: Nadia Rovderová

My choice of photographs by these two photographers and professors was not by chance. At first glance, their works comprise two independent units, but a second glance reveals that they are two parts of the same whole. For this reason, Vladimír Birgus’s colour photographs, taken for the most part on the streets of the world’s large metropolises, resonate so well with Jindřich Štreit’s black-and-white images of the Bohemian, Moravian, and French countryside. 
Both artists share an inclination towards documentary photography. The stories take place both in the city and in the countryside. The rural pairs are somewhat closer to one another, and the photographer is closer to them as well, becoming almost a direct part of their private lives. People’s relationships are clearly defined: Lovers. Partners expecting their offspring. Mother and child. A priest praying by a statue of the Saviour on the cross. Priest and baptized child. Drunken friends with their beers. Two workers at a funeral home carrying a bier with the deceased… 
The big cities are full of people, individuals who remain distant from one another or who are better at hiding what goes on between them. Are they parallel lines or two intersecting vectors? How does one influence the other; what does he bring for or take from the other? What is going on between those two? Love? Friendship? Blood ties? Nothing?
The interactions between the people in Birgus’s colour photoraphs strike us as familiar. A sales clerk and a shopper. A beggar and passers-by. A man and his dog. Dog and dog. A boy and a bird. A man and his shadow.
But what is it that unsettles us and forces us to explore these images? The photographs give the imagination free rein. They contain mysteries. Two women passing each other on a New York street. We see neither woman’s face, but one woman’s red coat and debonnaire silhouette and the other’s black coat and hat and tired, bent figure subtly and clearly indicate youth and old age.
Sometimes the interiors, exteriors, or items in the photographs provide a silent testimony as to what their users might have experienced. Man is omnipresent even when absent or anonymous. 
These different approaches to form and content combine to produce a strange tension. The interaction of these two ways of looking at interpersonal relations, at our relationship to ourselves and to the world around us, creates an atmosphere that encourages us to consider our place in this world, who we share this place with, who we are, and where we are headed, with whom and why…

Nadia Rovderová, Prague, January 2015