Pavel Brunclík

Landscape… The very first extant photograph known to history represented one. The image captured on an asphalt-covered pewter plate and titled Point de vue de la fenetre (View of Courtyard) was actually produced in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, one of the inventors of heliogravure, as photography was originally known. Soon, something of a golden age of landscape photography began. Whereas Niépce’s view from the window to a long eight hours to develop in direct sunlight, in 13 years that followed the exposure saw a reduction of some five to fifteen seconds, and in 1844, the very first book on photography appeared under a title of The Pencil of Nature. It was not devoted exclusively to landscape photography but a year later it was followed by Sun Pictures in Scotland, which was. William Henry Fox Talbot, the author of the two books, also discovered the negative-positive process permitting any number of copies made of the original image. So began the endless succession of those who – holding a camera in their hands – set out to capture the face of the Earth. Together with portraiture, landscape becomes of photography’s essential genres, attracting even painters who saw in it a faster and more precise tool of their imagination, as well as travellers and scholars, and following George Eastman’s invention of roll film, also a wide body of amateur photographers. Just about everybody took up landscape photography, the popularity causing it become even degraded, even though, as Edward Weston, one of the greatest “landscape artists” of all times, wrote in his diary, “…presenting reality in a way that would make the spectators feel that they do not view a mere symbol of something but the very thing in itself, revealed for the first time ever“ is extremely difficult. This is why the history of photography has not known too many truly great landscape photographers ands why the genre has remained an attractive and exciting challenge to photographers and spectators alike.

Pavel Brunclík took up landscape photography at a relatively mature age of forty seven, long after he had earned renown as advertising photographer and designer. In a way, he did right, for when he entered landscape photography, he arrived thoroughly prepared. He had developed a perfect feeling for shapes, he had learned to understand the mystery of light and had grasped the aesthetics of colour imagery. In just two years he came with an exhibition titled Návraty k podstatě (Returns to the Essentials), which was considered something of an surprise, just as a large exhibition (and a book) titled Země (The Earth), which followed a year later. All of his photographs featured simple shapes stripped of all nonessentials and anything spurious, structures nearing the character of abstract signs, colour abstractions verging on intensive revelations, and transformations of light making the visual perception an ever new experience. During his travels, covering systematically almost the whole world, Pavel Brunclík has sought neither exotic or diverse landscapes but rather that which is essential in natural, and therefore also human, life, which remains subject to unchangeable laws, constituting eternity.

The discovery of Nature’s magnificence became for him so powerful a culmination of his life-long experience that the urge to see more and more parts of the globe became something of an obsession with him, compelling him to keep searching for more reaffirmations of his instincts. And thus, having been to Latin America and the west coast of the U.S., he crisscrossed the globe from Easter Island to the Seychelles, from Réunion to Madagascar, from Africa to New Zealand and Australia, from Iceland to China and elsewhere… He is attracted by all the well-known and frequently-described „wonders of the world“, some of which are attributed with so much mystery that generations have considered them sacred. But he is perhaps most attracted precisely by what has been photographed and published thousands or even million times, appearing in tourist Baedekers, or sold as postcards, calendars, wall papers, just about anything. He is intrigued, for what has been seen and represented a million times he is eager to see in his own way. A surreal shape of a stone or a tree branch, sand dune waves, water swelling, bizarre rock formations, topsoil cracked with heat, a shadow cast onto the ground, all of these acquire the character of almost spectral apparitions in Brunclík’s photography which also quite openly acknowledges fascination with the elements and leads to a silent communication with them. It is as if gates leading to the very crux of the Earth opened in his photographs and it is entirely up to the spectator to see them as portraits summarizing the very character of our planet, or as actual representations of specific locations which more often than not can be identified only due to the existence of captions, and ones extremely laconic at that.

Practically no civilisation features appear in Brunclík’s landscapes, but if they do, than only almost incidentally, as something quite inconsequential vis-à-vis the sky with clouds dramatically lit and coloured by the sunset. For Brunclík, the landscape is never an unchangeable, static object but rather a continually changing image, as fleetingly ephemeral as the light which incessantly keeps redefining it. This is why Brunclík patiently waits for the light effects of sunrise and sunset, for the falling of the evening’s first shadows, for a catchy grouping of clouds pierced by light rays, for the dawn’s mystifying haze, for the endless hues of light-defined colour. Even though Brunclík is always perfectly prepared and aware what he is waiting for, fifty per cent of his pictures are snapped spontaneously, in emotional response to the moment. This, however, is facilitated by the fact that unlike most landscapists he dares to exclusively work with snapshot cameras using 35 mm roll film and a single exposure, shunning filters. He always composes his pictures for a full frame and never changes his pictures by cutouts. A frequent use of zoom lens allows him to give motifs an aesthetic quality of hazy mysteriousness.

“To the spectator, good photography is a visual adventure, yet one guaranteed to be real,“ wrote Eugen Wiškovský, one of the founders of Czech photographic realism, in his well-.known 1940 discourse Tvar a motiv (Shape and Motif). “The image must make do with the most basic devices of expression, with each ideally fulfilling its particular function contributing to the overall effect capable of producing an idea as convincing as a mathematical formula and as illuminating as a diagram, in order to be integrally transformed into shape.“ Wiškovský is ranked among landscapists, even though the images which he produced amount to reflections of extremely subjective perceptions. This stemmed from the original tendency of the Cubist and Futurist sensibility to render photographic images as geometrical elements, with their mutual interpenetrations resulting in a new beauty, and the contrast between a Constructivist reception of reality and its symbolization producing new meanings amounts to Wiškovský’s most significant contribution to the search of new trends taking place in photography of the 1930’s. In this respect, Wiškovský was akin to Jaromír Funke, the experimenting “constructor” of Czech avant-garde photography, for both sought new aesthetics of photography pivoting on “expression” rather than the traditional “image”. After all, it was Wiškovský who coined the term “expression photography“, caused a significant shift in the Czechs’ traditional concept of landscape photography and gave a lot of thought to the philosophical and-psychological aspects of creative photography. Wiškovský conceives his landscapes as metaphors. „In landscape photography,” he stated, “I’ve always limited myself to smaller parts distinguished by either geometry revealed by light-produced relief or by a surprising surface structure, sometimes endowed with considerable emotivity I’m eager to capture and convey to the observer… I’ve been most attracted by metamorphoses when the transposition of colour into a black-and-white scale changes reality into something altogether different.”

The Modernist rooting has been a basic tenet of all subsequent creative photography both at home and worldwide, for the key names in international photography include – apart from Edward Weston – also names such as Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Bill Brandt and others. Even the formulation of Brunclík’s landscapes is metaphorically based, stemming from primordial shape as the very basis of nature, from its structure, texture and facture. Of great importance in his landscapes is the detail, which is as significant as light and – unlike with the Modernist photographers mentioned – so is colour and its tonality. According to a universally accepted concept, any landscape photograph may be considered modern, if it results from dedicated efforts of the author to use a landscape theme as a model to produce a new two-dimensional reality rendering most effectively renders his ideas and imagination. In his fascination with landscape, the way in which Brunclík handles themes becomes more and more like working with a model, for he makes them accommodate his interpretation concepts. Ever since 1997 when he produced the first images incorporated into a series titled The Earth, we have witnessed a definite – even if perhaps just subconscious, shift in the approach to the photographed subjects. It is ruled by progressively sparer means of expression which in some aspects ultimately make pure photography approximate painting. In fact, Brunclík takes off from where Wiškovský and Funke anticipated a trace of colour in their black-and-white structures pf landscape sections of reality. Fast colour materials allow Brunclik to simulate the painter’s brushwork. Let us beware, however, of making specious comparisons, e.g. that a mere hint of a cloud seen in one of his photographs has its model in a painting by Josef Šíma, or that the forceful contour lines venture towards Expressionism, for to do so would be misleading. A first sight, the best images of Brunclík’s latest collection reveal only a very general affinity to painting and do not strive for any concrete likeness. And as the tendency is marked by different dating during the period in question (1997–2004), it amounts to a trend proving that Brunclík apparently manages to gradually arrive at his own, specific expression.

DANIELA MRÁZKOVÁ
September 2004


Translated by Šimon Pellar