Photography and landscape, this combination of words, need not necessarily mean just looking for a beautiful image or a piece of it. It can also relate much more deeply to the essence of seeking, wandering and understanding human life in the landscape, in nature, and also in the world. Wandering through the landscape can be a sensitive, romantic search for one’s own roots, such as in the case of Jaroslav Anděl, or a humble call for protecting the landscape and a desire to cohabitate with it in harmony as in the case of kindred Slovakian conceptual oriented artist, Michal Kern.
Jaroslav Anděl (1949) studied photography at the Film and TV School at AMU – the Academy of Performing Arts (1967 – 1972) and art history at Charles University in Prague (1969 – 1973). In the latter half of the 1970s he exhibited, for example, the photographic series, Tráva (Grass). The Mácha journey to Bezděz or to the Krkonoše Mountains is by its nature and essence already conceptual. Photographs in the hands of Jaroslav Anděl become a medium that preserves panoramic views from the path just slightly longer than the mere eye. Jaroslav Anděl moves through the landscape, he lets his thoughts run freely … and he take pictures.
Katarína Uhlířová
The exhibition came about as part of the first Fotograf Festival “The Eighties – Endless Waiting”.
