The rate at which Bohdan Holomíček (born 1943) goes through film material was the stuff of legend – the fruit of forty-five years of working with film being an unfathomable number of realistic observations. Likewise, no one can make an estimate of the original blow-ups with literary inscriptions, given to their protagonists as a memento of a repeated encounter. The artist, with his unmistakable poetics, installed his eightieth-birthday exhibition where he himself is at home, at the foothills of Krkonoše Mountains. The aged power plant in Trutnov, now transformed into the EPo1 Centre for Contemporary Art, now houses over a thousand pictures exposed before 2004 when Holomíček decided to switch to digital. The retrospective is accompanied by a publication, Album 1958–1977.¹

A personal confession

In order to highlight the protagonist’s story, publisher Viktor Stoilov decided to arrange the 238 reproductions in a more or less chronological order. The photographer thus gradually introduces us to his parents, siblings, friends or the aged teacher who first showed him the ABCs, math, and history… He shows us the temporary fashions, the manners of youngsters’ self-realisation, the changes in the nature of the photographer’s relationships, the boarding houses and workplaces he passed through, but he also does not fail to show us his own marriage, as well as his friends’ weddings, family gatherings, and his offspring… He unveils the passions he succumbed to, including the ones that are still present in his life today. In addition to photography itself, there is a clear tendency towards movement using diverse forms of transport: bicycles, buses, trains… Mopeds alternate with four-track veterans built 

before the war, kept in operation by a relay of owners, even operating in the furore of everyday traffic… But suddenly, this optimistically perceived quotidian life is invaded by the armies of five supposedly friendly regimes in August 1968, to prevent any potential disagreement with the placement of Soviet nuclear weapons on Czechoslovak soil.

Album 1958–1977 is composed of 176 pages in a 210 × 305 mm format. The modestly elegant graphics are by Robert V. Novák. The book will put one’s mind to the handmade bindings of unique positives chained together for reading long before photographers could publish in print. Viktor Stoilov had already published two monographs titled Bohdan Holomíček, one in 1995 and another in 2000, and 2016 saw the publication of Album Václav, which contains portraits and snapshots taken over the course of thirty-seven years – the span of Holomíček’s friendship with former president Václav Havel and his circle.

Generational wheel of fortune

Instead of the usual texts presenting analyses of his work, Holomíček’s albums include brochures with notes clarifying his relationships with the people captured in his photographs, as well as the situation in which the photograph was taken. Commemorative comments present many details and set all sorts of things straight. This aesthetic, which seemingly corresponds to the simplest use of the medium in question, was not born at once – it developed as an effect of a programmatic self-realisation and a coveted spontaneity in exposure… Hence the seemingly accidental vanishing effect at the beginning of the relatively frequent vertical compositions.

It is precisely the photographer’s range and purposeful testimony that helps make these images a study of the Central European lot that is greater than the perspective of a single person.

There are already plans for a future book, Album 1978–1989, as well as an edition of his theatre photographs. The realisation depends on the speed at which the artist can look back: “I want to do it myself – only then it does make sense to me. When I look through my archive, I experience the situations again and discover something about myself, I confirm my own life,” Bohdan Holomíček concludes.²

Text: Josef Moucha