Josef Moucha – Autoportraits with Assistance

When I began, half a century ago, to concern myself with historical positives, I did not perceive them as collection objects, but rather in an entirely direct manner – as traces of forebears (in the broadest sense of the word). I soon discovered that a fondness for the occasional acquisition of images of light was not exclusive to fellow practitioners of photography. Antiquarian shops, junk dealers, and markets – by now also those online – offer old photographs to a far wider public. Remnants of predecessors (albeit indirect) may be amassed wholly unsystematically and without speculation – all the more so as their purchase prices remain (relatively) modest. This is also due to the circumstance that common types of service photography were long treated dismissively by the histories of the discipline, which predominantly inclined toward autonomous authorial creations.

Art is readily defined by those who distance themselves from mass manifestations on the grounds that they are overly ingratiating. Certainly, commercial practice is guided also by fees, whose magnitude is furthered, among other things, by the idealisation of motifs. In the portraiture of full figures, this begins with the low vantage point, and thus with a seemingly natural monumentalisation. Despite awareness that it is an illusion, the impression remains so suggestive that one may readily yield to it. The subordination of aesthetic function to supposedly low utilitarian tricks nonetheless gives rise to recurring doubts concerning the desired nobility of the results… And it is here, at the latest, that the question emerges as to how far the continually invoked credibility of the photographic medium is conditioned by convention. All the more palpable, then, is the shortfall of ordinary wares when set against the authenticity of their prototypes…

But does not the fleetingness of time efface the original purpose of these former likenesses and cartes de visite? Not only have many of the names of photographic firms passed into obscurity, but the idols of their age have likewise vanished. In their stead, there opens a vista toward the vanishing point of all existence. The resonance of assisted self-portraits does not, after all, reside in sifting through a debased inertia. These likenesses also render visible the sitters' own notions of self-stylisation, and thus permit an inquiry into immortalised beings in their existential attitudes. For the assumption of a fitting pose is often a manifestation of temperament, personal experience, and momentary disposition… in short, a manifestation of spirit.

Who was that girl with the ribbon? – And what destiny awaited her?

Alongside visits to necropolises, photographs may inspire questions about anthropological constants and provoke reflections on memento mori. They thus become impulses toward an appreciation of the immediacy of existence…

IMAGES CAPTIONS

1 | Alfons Mucha, Untitled, Paris, 1899
2 | Karel Dvořák, Untitled, Josefov / Smiřice, undated
3 | František Krátký, Untitled, Kolín, undated

4 | Unidentified author, ›Stammtisch at Konigstein‹ (improvised postcard), Ostrava, 1901
5 | Josef Faix, Untitled, Prague, undated
6 | František Landisch, Prague, undated

7 | R. Moc, Untitled, Prague, undated
8 | Unidentified author, Untitled, undated
9 | Unidentified author, Račice nad Trotinou, undated

10 | Jindřich Vaněk, Rabindranath Tagore, Prague, 1921
11 | Jan F. Langhans, Untitled, Prague, 1918 (?)
12 | Alois Vích, Untitled, Bratislava, 1924
13 | Zdenko Feyfar, Countess Maria Waldstein at the Age of 104 in the Waldstein Palace, Prague, 9 October 1955

14 | Unidentified author, Untitled, Sabinov, 28 March 1957
15 | Karel Bartoníček, Untitled, Roudnice nad Labem, 1948
16 | V. Čermák, Untitled (Sokol postcard), Prague, 1947