Viktor Kolář | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Kolář in 2013 | |
| Born | September 7, 1941 |
| Known for | Photography |
| Style | Documentary photography |
| Website | viktorkolar |
Viktor Kolář (born 7 September 1941) is a Czech photographer. Along with Jindřich Štreit, Kolář is considered one of the most important exponents of Czech documentary photography. He mainly depicts urban life in the Ostrava region.
Kolář was born in 1941 in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia. His father was a documentary filmmaker and Ostrava’s principal photographer, owner of a photographic studio.
In 1953, Kolář began taking photographs, and studied the work of photographers including Henri Cartier-Bresson. From 1960 to 1964 he did teacher training at the Pedagogical Institute in Ostrava.
He then taught at an elementary school and from the mid 1960s was devoted to photography. In 1967, he befriended the photography theorist Anna Fárová and her husband, painter Libor Fára. In 1964, Kolář held his first solo exhibition.
In October 1968, after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, Kolář emigrated to Canada, working in the molybdenum mines and in the nickel smelters in Manitoba. Moving into photography, from 1971 to 1973, he documented shopping malls in Montreal, exhibiting the work in the Optica Gallery, Montreal.
In 1973, Kolář moved back to Czechoslovakia, via Paris and London. As a former emigrant, he was interrogated by police on several occasions and, distrusted by the state, was eventually unable to work as a photographer. Instead, during that period of "normalization", he worked as a laborer in Nová Huť steelworks, while covertly documenting the Ostrava Region with his camera. From 1975 to 1984, he worked as a stage technician at the Petr Bezruč Theatre. In 1985, Kolář again worked as a freelance photographer and in 1991 won the Mother Jones International Photography Award.
Vladimír Birgus and Jan Mlčoch write that from as early as the late 1960s:
[Kolář] was often uncompromising in revealing the depreciation of ethical values, shallowness, and alcohol-induced merriment of the pub, and yet he was poetical in discovering extraordinary moments of everyday life.: 156
They add that his ability to create works allowing for a variety of interpretations makes him "one of the first Czech photographers closer to Robert Frank than to the humanistic photojournalists of Magnum or Life magazine so generally admired and imitated".: 156
After his return from Canada to Czechoslovakia, however, he moved away from social documentary and sociological approaches, instead moving to more subjective work, with unusual compositions, raising questions as:
he searches in crowd scenes for the most precise photographic expression of his themes, including people's orientation in life, frustration, atrophy of the emotions and of faith, the relationship between the individual and the social system, and the adoration of consumerism.: 205–206
In 1994, after the Velvet Revolution, Kolář began to teach documentary photography at FAMU in Prague, where he was appointed associate professor in 2000. He also travelled and lectured across the USA.
Kolář's work is held in the following permanent collections:
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