Between the two world wars, the city of Kolín witnessed the activity of three personalities of fundamental significance to the development of modern Czech photography: Josef Sudek (1896–1976), Jaromír Funke (1896–1945), and Eugen Wiškovský (1888–1964). While Sudek’s and Funke’s works were published in numerous books and presented at countless exhibitions both in the Czech Republic and abroad and rightfully received international renown, the oeuvre of Eugen Wiškovský is still waiting to be duly appreciated. The intimate retrospective held in the Regional Museum in Kolín is only the fifth solo exhibition of this photographer (and it is symptomatic that his first exhibition in 1985 was not realized in, what was then, Czechoslovakia, but in the Italian city of Turin at the “Torino Fotografia” festival). There is no doubt that Wiškovský’s avant-garde photographs rank amongst the most original and progressive Czech contributions to the development of modern interwar photography. His theoretical works from between the 1920s and 1940s largely anticipated trends which only began to develop in the decades to come. Wiškovský’s photographic work is not extensive either in scope or in the range of subjects but it is of an extraordinary importance due to its profound ideas and innovation.

Eugen Wiškovský was born on 20 September 1888 in Dvůr Králové nad Labem to a respected middle-class family – his father Alois Wiškovský was a caretaker of the local hospital, his mother Eugenie (born Hotovcová) was a daughter of the regional administrator. Wiškovský had three siblings – a three-year older brother, Alois and younger brothers, Otakar and Bedřich, who were born in one-year intervals after him. He graduated from grammar school in Dvůr Králové and, in 1906, began studying French, German and psychology at the Philosophical Faculty of the Czech Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague. He spent the winter term of his last school year (1909–1910) on scholarship at the university in Geneva. After graduation he was involved in teaching at various secondary schools, mainly at the State Grammar School in Kolín. He lectured there until 1937, when the interruption of the First World War placed him, as a soldier of the Austrian-Hungarian army, into the fight at Italian and Russian fronts. Later, after suffering two injuries, he joined the rearward army in Česká Lípa. Towards the end of the war, in 1917, he married 23-year old Anna Streitová. Their first daughter, Eva (d. 1997) was born in 1918 and their younger daughter, Hana (d. 1985) was born one year later.

Wiškovský was an educated man of many talents and interests: he developed a reform program for teaching foreign languages at secondary schools, was co-author of a Czech-German dictionary, collaborated with Aliance Française, was involved in psychology (was a member of the Czech Psychological Society), translated Symbolist works by Maurice Maeterlinck as well as Freud’s and Jung’s writings on psychology, was deeply interested in literature and fine arts, was a professional tennis player and was engaged in swimming, skating, athletics and camcraft.

He inherited his interest in photography from his father. As a boy, he used his father’s camera producing 13 x 18 cm negatives for various family photos. At the age of around 14, he received better equipment for making 9 x 12 cm plates. His engagement with photography was, however, gradually pushed aside by other hobbies, and Wiškovský only returned to this field at the end of the First World War in portraits of his wife and older daughter. His more serious interest in photography dates to the late 1920s in Kolín. At that time, he became friends with his former student from the local grammar school, Jaromír Funke, who was already one of the most significant representatives of the Czech photographic avant-garde movement. He also knew Josef Sudek – but, while he was close to Funke both intellectually and socially (the two were highly respected Kolín citizens), Sudek’s deliberately accentuated plebeian posture represented a certain barrier between the two artists, especially in the beginnings of their relationship.

Wiškovský and Funke went on photographic expeditions together to the construction of an ESSO power station, built after the plans of architect Franger. Here the two took Constructivist photographs with dynamic diagonal compositions of the factory smokestack and, in the style of New Materiality, shot, seemingly non-photogenic, water pipes, cement soffit scaffoldings and rails. Wiškovský was not only visualising modern architecture – he interpreted it. The architecture itself often solely served him as his point of departure and inspiration for his work, and he did not much care about which construction he captured.

Wiškovský’s photographs were, already at that time, characteristic of abstracting the objects depicted into simple geometric shapes and of a search for visual metaphors. In his seemingly simple, but actually thoroughly elaborate and compositionally chiselled photographs of such items as bundles of iron bars, screws and bolts, dielectrics, pipes, sieves, details of turbines, bulbs and mortars, Wiškovský was able to reveal some very impressive shapes. He displayed everyday objects, seen many times before both at home and at the construction of the Kolín power plant, in an innovative and unclichéd way, thus enchanting viewers and proving that their gaze has hitherto been worn off and full of lethargy. With refined subtleness, he shot close details that pulled the featured objects out of their common spatial contexts, and often shifted both perspective and scale. By transferring his main motifs from their colour original into B/W photographs, by using cutouts and by his ingenious work with light, he freed them from otiose subsidiaries, and emphasized important lines and tones. As it is apparent from the example of his photographs of eggs, corrugated iron, ceramic pipes and wool spindles, he often used the method of multiplication. Wiškovský’s extraordinary resourcefulness, artistic sense and taste along with his sense of technical precision thus allowed him to realize his conviction that the more uncommon the contents, the more uncommon the presentation must be.

Photographs created by Wiškovský in the style of New Materiality are strictly rational but also full of fantasy and imagination. They combine the objectivity that comes from the flawless depiction of a detail found in his surrounding world and the subjectivity of the artist’s opinion, his distinctive gaze, the thinking and feeling of his inner world. They strikingly differ from the reality which they depict – here, the reality received special creative features; these are peculiar works of art with a clearly legible touch from their author. When there are any people in the photographs, they only play the part of staffage in the landscape, urban environment or Constructivist compositions. An exception in this sense is Wiškovský’s portraits of his wife, daughter and friends and his experimental portraits based on the interplay of light and shadow, pictures of children at play and shots from trampish camps, along with his series of reportage photos made during the 1945 Prague Upheaval which is totally isolated in his oeuvre.

Wiškovský’s photographs from his period of New Materiality are quite rare; they moreover often display various takes of the same objects. Unlike Funke, Wiškovský frequently used to return to particular motifs and photographed them endlessly, until he was content with the final result. His inheritance in many cases contains more than ten negatives with different variants of the same shot, oft taken within long periods of time. His daughter and friends of Josef Ehm recollect that Wiškovský nonetheless usually prepared each shot for many hours and, contrarily, he often set off with a camera and returned without a single photograph. Time and time again, he succeeded to surpass the stern depiction of reality, characteristic, for example, of Albert Renger-Patzsch, Aenna Biermann and other representatives of New Materiality, and to create more symbolical photographs whose metaphoric character is, in certain aspects, similar to the photographs of shells and artichokes by Edward Weston.

Objects in some of Wiškovský’s photographs are intentionally stripped of their identity. Albeit the analogies and metaphors of shape are not present in all his works, they, however, play a significant role in some of them (e.g., the photograph of corrugated iron evokes the idea of long flowing hair or the surface of a shell; the photograph of rhythmically arranged eggs is reminiscent of fish scales; the detail of the waste from sugar-refining, floating on polluted water, may invoke the look of a map of south Asia or an arabesque, and so on). This aspect is most conspicuous in the photograph entitled Moon Lanscape (sometimes also bluntly published as Collars) of 1929 – i.e. from the very beginnings of Wiškovský’s serious photographic work. The composition of the hard shirt collars was – through suppressing scale, isolating the repeated detail, ingenious lighting using a light-bulb inserted between the collars and adding the outline of a coin, placed (in the later variant of the photograph) on the photographic paper as the image of Earth – transformed into an imaginative picture of the Moon surface with craters. The photograph is a perfect example of applying metaphorical meaning.

In 1937, Wiškovský and his family moved to Prague where he lectured at the Realschule in Ječná Street and later at the Ladies’ Realschule in the Prague neighbourhood of Libeň. In Prague, he maintained close contacts with Funke who began teaching photography at the State School of Graphic Arts there in September 1935.

While Wiškovský mainly photographed industrial and technical objects and their details as well as modern architecture in Kolín, it was Prague that, quite paradoxically, turned his attention to landscape. His photographs emphasizing his own subjective input focus on elementary geometric shapes, unique surface structures and fanciful views. The photographer did not need to travel far abroad in order to capture his motifs; he used to find them in the few places which he had visited and which he intimately knew. This was especially the case of the Prague neighbourhood of Hlubočepy whose picturesque rocks and Prokopské Valley had attracted many photographers before him. Similarly, Wiškovský photographed the monumental Hlubočepy rocks under the romantic early evening light, and particularly their details, stripped of their real scale and the unveiling natural sculptures and elementary forms, and sometimes also the metaphorical analogies of shape. In a similar manner, he was mesmerized by the projections of the local terrain and the bizarre outlines of the fields, which he accentuated by artificial lighting. Another of his favoured sites in Prague and its surroundings was the area of Vidouc in the neighbourhood of Jinonice where he, for example, discovered the motifs of a field and a field road whose shape is reminiscent of a fluttering banner and flagpole from the bird’s eye view. In most cases, these were landscapes that were substantially transformed by people, thus documenting the relationship between humans and nature.

The most unique landscape photographs by Wiškovský were taken in the surroundings of the Smíchov estate of Šalamounka. The photographer captured the section of the local landscape with a hill and a house in countless variants: first, he was captivated by the outlines of mowed grass, then, by the geometrical shapes of hay stacks and, yet another time, by the sinister shadow of the neighbouring hill reminiscent of a phantasmal symbolical picture. Wiškovský’s landscape work culminates in the metaphoric photograph of a flattened corn field with a protruding farm rooftop, which invokes the idea of a boat sinking in a stormy sea. This almost surreal combination of reality and imaginary vision is emphasized by the title of the photograph, Disaster, under which it was, however, only published later (the original title was Corn).

The 1930s and 1940s marked the most significant period of Wiškovský’s activities in the field of theory. He mostly owed this to his close friends, Josef Ehm and Jaromír Funke. In October 1939, Ehm was appointed the new editor-in-chief of the Fotografický obzor (Photographic Horizon) magazine, and invited Funke to be its editor. At that time, Wiškovský not only published many photographs in the periodical, but also wrote four essays for it – “Tvar a motif” (Motif and Form), “Dezorientace názorů na fotografii” (Disorientated Opinions on Photography), “Zobrazení, projev, sdělení” (Depiction, Manifestation, Message), and “Oproštěním k projevu” (Manifestation through Disengagement) – which, along with the texts written by Jaromír Funke and Karel Teige, laid the foundation for the modern Czech theory of photography. With these essays, similar to the other articles published between 1946 and 1948, Wiškovský became one of the first to derive the compositional rules of photographic imagery from the perception process on the grounds of Gestalt psychology, to discuss the issues of the meaning of photography and to apply the knowledge gained from information theory in order to develop a new system in the theory of photography. Due to their insight, originality and preciseness of formulation, these theories were so unique within contemporary Czech writings on photography that they largely remained misunderstood by the wider public and were only duly appreciated after many decades. We, however, cannot leave both Wiškovský’s above-mentioned essays and his other published theoretical works unnoticed, although these often repeated – for example stating in different wording that a high-quality photograph represents a visual experience guaranteeing reality (while this very viewer’s conviction – that “the depicted is the real”, claimed by Wiškovský so many times – has been radically undermined by the recent boom of digital technologies).

Ehm and Funke managed to run the Photographic Horizon magazine along first-rate and courageous lines and, even in November 1940 – i.e. in the period when the official German view of avant-garde as perverse art was long dated already – they pushed through a special issue devoted to experimental photography. In early 1941 they, however, decided to give up publishing and editing the magazine as a result of the increased intensity of direct denouncements made towards them by other, unnamed Czech photographers. Wiškovský thus lost his platform for publication of his theoretical articles until the end of the war. He nonetheless never ceased to photograph.

During the brief period of relative freedom and democracy between the end of the Second World War and the Communist putsch of February 1948, Wiškovský published his theoretical works in the magazines Fotografie (Photography), Československá fotografie (Czechoslovak Photography), and Zpravodaj fotografů (Photography Correspondent). Simultaneously to his publication activity, he shot landscape photographs from the Hlubočepy neighbourhood, Prague still-lifes and details of various natural motifs (e.g. the famous photograph Chestnut Trees). At that time, Wiškovský also participated in several prominent group exhibitions – especially the exhibition “Moderní fotografie v Československu” (Modern Photography in Czechoslovakia), curated by Karel Teige, which premiered at the Association of Arts and Crafts in Vienna in late July 1947 and was later re-run in Zurich.

Soon after the Communist outbreak in Czechoslovakia in 1948, the new regime began to ex parte prefer the propagandist role of photography that followed the lines of its Social Realism, and there thus was no more space left for either creative experiments or thoughtful essays based on the ideas of Gestaltism. Wiškovský chose to abandon both the field of education and public life and to draw back into privacy during that time. His 1950s’ activities from the field of photography are basically focused on the extensive cycle of imaginative photographs, entitled From the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague, where he confronted the decaying tombs and bizarre forms of the surrounding trees and bushes, thus discovering analogies and contrasts between the nature which was created by humans and nature untouched. He also simultaneously photographed the historical architecture of Prague and flowers and created genre shots of people strolling in the park and children jaunting, and returned to his old motifs of confronting nature and human interventions into it.

The real rediscovery of Eugen Wiškovský’s oeuvre largely owes the efforts of the photography historian Anna Fárová, which dates back to the early 1960s. Wiškovský, alas, did not live to see the publication of the minor monograph that Fárová prepared as the 23rd volume of the edition entitled Umělecká fotografie (Art Photography) and published by the State Publishing House of Fine Literature and Arts in Prague in June 1964. He died on 15 January of the same year at the age of seventy five.

Vladimír Birgus