For his 70th birthday exhibition, Jaroslav Kučera, the preeminent exponent of Czech life photography today, has come up with a project that surprisingly does not focus on his famous ‘people on the margin of society’, but on the apparently banal material objects that surround us. And what they tell us about our world is just as powerful as when the lens is trained on actual human beings – in fact often even more so. Especially when the photographer presents his images in masterfully juxtaposed pairs that elicit in us a thrilling sense of the mysterious – an awareness of the hidden beauty in our human world. The result is a kind of magic ‘surbanalism’, a journey of discovery through the most ordinary of everyday objects.

In his latest project, Silent Dialogues, JAROSLAV KUČERA has done something surprising. Instead of pursuing his usual fascinating theme of ‘people on the margin’ (that is, individuals whose lives don’t fit into the standard mould), the preeminent exponent of Czech life photography with his passionate interest in social issues now presents us with a world of inanimate objects – the physical environment that these people inhabit. He is drawn to the most ordinary things – which are in fact nothing less than poetic objets trouvés. In doing so he provides us with clear proof of that remarkable assertion of the Surrealists, that ‘when depicting the undoubtedly real we are on the verge of the fantastically unreal.’

Kučera is fully aware of the affective impact of banal objects, of their capacity to evoke memories and desires, reveal hidden meanings, and trigger emotional associations. With him, however, it is not so much a case of surrealism as of surbanalism. For unlike Jindřich Štyrský and later (in the Czech tradition) Vilém Reichmann, Emila Medková, Miroslav Hák and Jiří Sever, Kučera does not seek out aspects of reality that are in themselves bizarre, but on the contrary those that are most banal. That are, in the dictionary definition sense, ‘ordinary, insignificant’. To paraphrase the famous words of Karel Teige, theoretician of the interwar avant-garde, and apply them to Kučera: ‘By characterizing surbanalism as magic banalism, we are identifying pretty exactly one of its chief features.’

Magic – that is the word for Kučera’s Silent Dialogues. And the most magical thing about these works is that what they tell us about ourselves and the times we live in is just as powerful as when the lens is trained on actual human beings – in fact often even more so. Especially when the photographer links his images in pairs. These masterful juxtapositions take the viewer into a realm of intriguing secret conversations, into an unseen human domain. Thus not even in this latest project has Kučera deviated from his creative path during a lifetime of photography. Quite the reverse. He is simply letting himself – and us – take a fresh, more magical view of the world we live in.

 Daniela Mrázková, curator