Jaroslav Rössler: Czech Avant-Garde Photographer - Tapa blanda

The work of Jaroslav Roessler, one of the most important photographers of the Czech avant-garde of the first half off the twentieth century. Jaroslav Roessler (1902-1990) was one of the Czech avant-garde photographers of the first half of the twentieth century whose work has only recently become known outside Eastern Europe. Czech photography in the twenties and thirties produced radical modernist works that incorporated principles of abstract art and constructivism; Jaroslav Roessler was one of the most important and distinctive artists of the period. He became known for his fusing of different styles, bringing together elements of symbolism, pictorialism, expressionism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, new objectivity, and abstract art. His photographs often reduced images to elementary lines and shapes that seemed to form a new reality; he would photograph simple objects against a stark background of black and white, or use long exposures to picture hazy cones and spheres of light. From 1927 to 1935 he lived and worked in Paris, producing work influenced by constructivism and new objectivity. He used the photographic techniques and compositional approaches of the avant-garde, including photograms, large details, diagonal composition, photomontage, and double exposures, and experimented with color advertising photographs and still lifes produced with the carbro print process. After his return to Prague, he was relatively inactive until the late 1950s, when he reconnected with Czech artistic and photographic trends of that period, including informalism. This book documents each stage of Roessler's career with a generous selection of duotone images, some of which have never been published before. The photographs are accompanied by texts by Vladimir Birgus, Jan Mlcoch, Robert Silverio, Karel Srp, and Matthew Witkovsky.

Vladimir Birgus is Professor at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and Head of the Institute of Creative Photography at Silesian University in Opava. He is the author of numerous books on Czech and European photography, including Photographer Frantisek Drtikol, Czech Photography of the 1990s, and The Nude in Czech Photography. Jan Mlcoch is curator of the Photography Collection at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague. He is the author of Frantisek Drtikol: Photographs 1901-1914 and coauthor of The Nude in Czech Photography. Vladimir Birgus is Professor at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and Head of the Institute of Creative Photography at Silesian University in Opava. He is the author of numerous books on Czech and European photography, including Photographer Frantisek Drtikol, Czech Photography of the 1990s, and The Nude in Czech Photography. Jan Mlcoch is curator of the Photography Collection at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague. He is the author of Frantisek Drtikol: Photographs 1901-1914 and coauthor of The Nude in Czech Photography. MATTHEW S. WITKOVSKY is a research associate at the National Gallery of Art, where he is helping to organize a survey exhibition of international Dada. He is the author of two essays on architecture and modernity, published in the Prague journal Umeni/Art, and has provided translations and commentary for reprints of the Czech avant-garde books Alphabet (1926) and Photography Sees the Surface (1935), both with Michigan Slavic Publications. His future projects include Constructions and Findings, a thematic exhibition on interwar photography in central Europe.