Ján Rečo – A Farewell to the Nude

Influenced by his teacher Pavel Štech at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, Rečo created documentary series based on the principles of humanist photojournalism, so popular in Czechoslovakia. Photojournalism also influenced his graduation series, Ministerstvo práce a sociálních věcí (The Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, 1977) and the following cycle Ústavy (Institutions, 1978–1984), including photographs of a retirement home and social care institutions for handicapped children that Rečo took for the Ministry.

In this issue of Fotograf, however, we are interested in his documentary series that focused on the body. In 1978, Rečo created Portréty z ulice (The Street Portraits) – soon followed by the Nahaté portréty (The Naked Portraits, 1980–1986) series. In soft light and in front of a universal white background, he captured half-bodies of women, some of them on the verge of adulthood, some more mature. Rečo was playing with the conventional theme of a dressed photographer, a stripped-up model and the shame game between the two. His later cycle, Horníci (Miners), has even a more documentary character: it includes comparative couples of dressed and naked miners who have just left the pit. We can compare the postures and gestures of the dressed and naked men, and, comparing the series with the cycle about women, we can also see the absence of shame.

Both the cycles catch your attention with their unusual descriptiveness. In the photographs, Rečo shows his indifference to the tradition of the nude and lack of interest in the body as a carrier of gender, social or political significance. These approaches were quite uncommon at that time. Although Rečo’s images show nudity, they seem to be closer to the genre of portrait, as the title of the first series suggests. Rečo himself says: "When girls are naked, they are naked inside, too – some of them are shy, some like showing off. Nudity reveals the nature of people."¹ Rečo photographs girls in an apparent documentary way – captured on a film, the photographs mainly show unprofessional models coping with nudity in front of the dressed photographer. Rečo captures their reactions to this unusual situation, from provocative postures to shyness or embarrassed giggling. "A person can be characterized not only by their clothes, but also by the absence of clothes," says Antonín Dufek in the catalogue for the then important exhibition, Tělo v československé fotografii (1900–1986) (The Body in Czechoslovak Photography), which also presented Rečo’s The Naked Portraits. Rečo captured mainly shame. "Shame is the best thing the woman can wear when she takes off her clothes," said Daniela Mrázková in an interview with a model. That is why the open documentation of face expressions seems so surprising. What is common today used to be unique. Models in paintings and photographs did not usually want to be confronted with their nudity in their everyday or professional lives.

In the 1980, the traditional aesthetic model of the de-erotized nude, based on the light abstraction of shapes and lines, was still popular. The principles of this concept of photography were codified by Ján Šmok in the two editions of his book Akt vo fotografii (The Nude in Photography, 1969 and 1986). We can see the tradition in the artistic nudes by Alois Zych, photographs by Josef Ehm, Václav Zykmund, Miroslav Hák, Karel Ludwig and Josef Prošek, and images by Josefa Sudek, Ján Šmok and Miloslav Stibor. Their work was inspired both by abstract and post-cubist sculpture. They are based on the concept of the nude as "a contemplation of the eternal beauty of the form… the unchanging beauty of womanhood…"^² The photographs are characterized by static sculpturesqueness, monumentalization, and the resulting coldness. The photographed female body is significantly de-erotized according to the contemporary views on art and ethics, reduced to geometrical shapes and pure lines, as if it were only a pretext for a dematerialized shape, a suitable obstacle for a play with light and shadows, an opportunity to find the right composition or reveal "the hidden order of the world".

The Naked Portraits by Ján Rečo do not follow this tradition of the aestheticized abstract nude. They have much more in common with the first photographs of the Slovak New Wave that were taken only a few years later – mainly with their playful staging of naked figures in the natural surroundings of dormitory rooms. In the 1980s, slightly erotic calendars published by state-owned enterprises were popular, but the Czechoslovak society was quite prudish, at least on the outside. It is difficult to convey the provocative character of nude photographs of that time to today’s viewer who is accustomed to the ubiquity of the naked body in arts, the media and advertisements in public space. Photographs by Vasil Stanko, were exhibited at Fotochema in Prague in 1984, so outraged the viewers they had to be taken down.³ As Rečo remembers, his photographs received similar reactions at that time. 

Text | Tomáš Pospěch

All images | Ján Rečo, from the series Nahaté portréty (The Naked Portraits), 1980–1986