Female Lion Tamers Female Lion Tamers
i
Luskačová, Markéta "Girls playing with sweaters on the primary school playground", London, 1998; photo: © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023
Opinions

Female Lion Tamers

Agnieszka Rzonca
Reading
time 12 minutes

In the space of the last hundred years, there have been five outstanding female photographers who have immortalized both famous people and the disappearing worlds of the Czech provinces. As it turns out, none of them took up photography by accident.

I can’t help it—when I think of photography in Czechia, the person that comes to mind is the fictional Tereza from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. A wonderful, multifaceted heroine, who eludes all conventions. Just as we think we are beginning to understand Tereza, she makes a U-turn. Her view of the world, and the photos she takes, are equally unconventional. She took up photography unexpectedly, after moving from the provinces to Prague. As the novel’s narrator explains: “The elan with which Tereza flung herself into her new Prague existence was both frenzied and precarious. […] Tereza had a job in a darkroom, but it was not enough for her.” Soon she, too, started taking photos. Perhaps she was driven to do so by the same inner compulsion suggested by the bon mot of one of the most famous American photographers of the twentieth century, Dorothea Lange: “It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.”

Lucia’s Light

Lucia Moholy was an artist from Prague who gained worldwide fame, although her work became known before she did. Moholy’s distinctive, sophisticated photos commemorated many of the accomplishments of the Bauhaus. However, over the years, her works were reproduced without credit to her, or were attributed to other artists. Moholy came from a wealthy secularized Jewish family, just like Franz Kafka, who was nearly a decade her senior. She studied history and philosophy in Prague before moving to Berlin, where she worked as an editor for various publishers. Her fascination with photography began in 1915, at the age of twenty-one, when she wrote in her diary: “The

Information

You’ve reached your free article’s limit this month. You can get unlimited access to all our articles and audio content with our digital subscription. If you have an active subscription, please log in.

Subscribe

Also read:

A Fictional Autobiography A Fictional Autobiography
Photo

A Fictional Autobiography

Rinus Van de Velde

Rinus Van de Velde is a Belgian artist whose work spans a range of media, though he is best known for his large-scale narrative drawings. Each features a handwritten caption of one of his musings, which are often witty or existential in nature. While the charcoal drawings often depict him as a central figure, the majority of his colorful oil pastel works only insinuate a human presence.  

Though Van de Velde’s work reads as plein air, he has never been to the places in his drawings and instead imagines them from the confines of his studio. At times the works take the form of letters to other artists, and he is often in dialogue with the likes of Matisse, Monet, Hockney, and Doig. With his drawings, he has created a fantasy life for himself of the places he wishes to have seen and the life he wishes to have lived. The images presented here feature work from his most recent shows at Max Hetzler in Paris and Tim Van Laere in Rome.

Continue reading