PA V E L B A Ň K A REFLECTION
Pavel Baňka was born in 1941 in Prague, and has had several creative “lives”, which have intermingled for decades. As a photographer and as a teacher and a mentor in the Czech Republic, United States and United Kingdom, he has influenced generations of artists. He is also known as a curator, writer, and the founder of the popular photography magazine Fotograf. His work is held in many collections including: Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi, Belgium; George Eastman House, Rochester, New York, USA; Art Institute of Chicago, USA; Paris Audio Visual, France. His photographs have been exhibited in galleries and festivals all over the world.
PA V E L B A Ň K A REFLECTION
If we tried to imagine Pavel Baňka’s creative life as a photograph, its inherently transient nature would probably show very soon. There would be a steady stream of portraits, staged figurative actions, spaces artificially created by the artist himself, images verging on the abstract, as well as landscapes and interiors with a spiritual dimension. Such an imaginary picture would then suggest a host of frameworks within which Baňka’s work might be arranged, based on various inner and external criteria – just as the motif of the frame itself keeps recurring throughout Baňka’s work. A biographical angle would show that ever since his beginnings as a self-taught photographer, Baňka has retained his determination to search and invent, thus keeping at bay any danger of artistic stagnation, while always putting new approaches to the test. Within the framework of Czech photography, Baňka’s place would be somewhere behind the founding father figure of Jan Sudek, whom he also references in his early works, and alongside Jan Svoboda, with whom he also shares an interest in the work of renowned Czech glass and jewellery artists. In Baňka’s nudes and some of the portraits, we can also find traces of another giant of Czech photography, František Drtikol. Like Drtikol, Baňka’s main objective is not creating a mere image of the subject, but rather constructing a photographic picture, where the photographed figure acts only as a fully integrated, yet provocative, part of the whole. In Baňka’s photographs, a piece of jewellery does not function as a mere decoration of the model but rather as an extension of their body and an expression of their mood. With each small prop, the spatial dimensions and inner meaning of the portrait shift. This book focuses mainly on Baňka’s early work and is divided into three areas entitled Construction, Figuration, and Abstraction. The title Construction refers to the way an image is constructed by light. Baňka photographs panels of mirrors placed in a landscape, he opens windows, thus reflecting and focusing the view into the interior. The mechanisms of light shining through or being reflected, as captured in Baňka’s photographs, refine both the vision and the awareness of space. In his kinetic, phased figurative pictures (Figuration), Baňka’s wife, his daughter, or he himself then become the protagonists of a few second-long photographic actions: a simple movement creates a sequence, interconnecting personal and general levels. Other photographs play out almost on the surface so to speak. The term Abstraction is not used to suggest the notion that images lose their descriptiveness – rather, they shed the shackles of exact contours, becoming blurry and gaining evocativeness. In his experiments with exposure length, the immediate moment of a picture being taken is enriched by the time frame of the past as well as of the possible, just as Baňka himself seems to suggest when he speaks of “recollections” and “imaginations”.
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To my father Václav Baňka (1905–1971)
A DREAM
Dream of My Father After many long years, I am appearing in my dreams again – I’m small, about six years old, and laying upstairs in the children’s bedroom, when the little sorceress comes, with swords around her waist, a skirt of swords that she spins and spins until the skirt lifts to show her tiny suntanned body (she was about my size); my first erotic feelings. She used to visit me often then, but that’s not all. As I lay in my bed, she would dance on top of the table pushed all the way to the bedstead. But in that dream I’m not asleep, I’m wide awake, watching her; I wish to speak to her, but I don’t know her name and it feels silly to call her “Little sorcerer,” as she watches me with her dark gaze, and smiles, a little. And moments later, she’s laughing, outright. I stir, I want to get up, and she jumps off the table and dances out of the door, as I walk to the window: I hear the noise of a horse’s hooves outside in the yard, tiled with stone slabs. Outside, my father is saddling a horse. Our mare Sparkle. Dad looks up to me, smiling, as if he knows. Suddenly, awareness seeps into the dream, the awareness that my father is dead, he has been dead for a long while. I hold on to the dream for dear life, wishing, willing it to continue. I fight against being returned to real time, but even so, as I wake, I am flooded with a sense of peculiar, unexpected happiness… Pavel Baňka (May 6, 2016)
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To my father Václav Baňka (1905–1971)
A DREAM
Dream of My Father After many long years, I am appearing in my dreams again – I’m small, about six years old, and laying upstairs in the children’s bedroom, when the little sorceress comes, with swords around her waist, a skirt of swords that she spins and spins until the skirt lifts to show her tiny suntanned body (she was about my size); my first erotic feelings. She used to visit me often then, but that’s not all. As I lay in my bed, she would dance on top of the table pushed all the way to the bedstead. But in that dream I’m not asleep, I’m wide awake, watching her; I wish to speak to her, but I don’t know her name and it feels silly to call her “Little sorcerer,” as she watches me with her dark gaze, and smiles, a little. And moments later, she’s laughing, outright. I stir, I want to get up, and she jumps off the table and dances out of the door, as I walk to the window: I hear the noise of a horse’s hooves outside in the yard, tiled with stone slabs. Outside, my father is saddling a horse. Our mare Sparkle. Dad looks up to me, smiling, as if he knows. Suddenly, awareness seeps into the dream, the awareness that my father is dead, he has been dead for a long while. I hold on to the dream for dear life, wishing, willing it to continue. I fight against being returned to real time, but even so, as I wake, I am flooded with a sense of peculiar, unexpected happiness… Pavel Baňka (May 6, 2016)
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CONSTRUCTION
Paper Frame Papírový rámeček 1982
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CONSTRUCTION
Paper Frame Papírový rámeček 1982
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Flowers behind Matt Glass. Tribute to Josef Sudek Květiny za matným sklem, pocta Josefu Sudkovi 1981
Light through the Bottle Světlo prochází lahví 1982
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Flowers behind Matt Glass. Tribute to Josef Sudek Květiny za matným sklem, pocta Josefu Sudkovi 1981
Light through the Bottle Světlo prochází lahví 1982
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FIGURATION
Rising of “Rudé Právo” Newspaper Zvedání Rudého práva 1982
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FIGURATION
Rising of “Rudé Právo” Newspaper Zvedání Rudého práva 1982
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Nude with Fish Akt s rybou 1987
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Nude with Fish Akt s rybou 1987
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Father and Daughter II Otec a dcera II 1982
Father and Daughter I Otec a dcera I 1982
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Father and Daughter II Otec a dcera II 1982
Father and Daughter I Otec a dcera I 1982
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ABSTRACTION
In the Gallery # I V galerii č. I 1994
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ABSTRACTION
In the Gallery # I V galerii č. I 1994
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1991
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1991
107
In the Gallery # II V galerii č. II 1994
In the Gallery # IV V galerii č. IV 1994
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In the Gallery # II V galerii č. II 1994
In the Gallery # IV V galerii č. IV 1994
109
EPILOGUE 129
EPILOGUE 129