Martin Polak / Lukas Jasansky

Prague in the Late 1980s: Moving Away from Subjective Art Photography

Jasanský was born in Prague in 1965 and Polák in 1966, and the two began working together in the mid-1980s. Their series list already includes Old & Arranged, Pragensia, and Television in 1986–88, with the joint authorship functioning as the basic unit of the work^*3. In its reconsideration of Czech photography, the Museum of Contemporary Photography describes the post-Velvet Revolution moment as one in which photography’s role itself was reexamined, and presents the duo as artists who distanced themselves from the pronounced subjectivity then prevalent in Czech art photography^*1.

Their earliest works, Old & Arranged and New Arranged, have been discussed in relation to photographic education, the Slovak New Wave, and staged photography. In a 2012 interview, Polák identifies the visual artist František Skála, rather than a direct photographic reference, as the strongest influence on him at the time^*25. The frontal, undramatic description of Pragensia was later called “Becher-like,” but the duo did not know the Bechers when the work was made. They have recalled that they independently “discovered” the act of photographing ordinary things with no obvious element designed to please a viewer^*25. What they sought through photography was a way to test what remained when familiar reality was stripped of the conventional appeal of art photography.

They repeatedly photograph streets, buildings, villages, and everyday objects from a measured distance, suppressing dramatic moments and overt authorial emotion. Artlist describes the work as post-conceptual photography that restrains “artistic” effects while testing the conventions of the medium^*2. VVP AVU’s archival record of series since the late 1980s likewise documents their deliberate adoption of established genre names in projects such as Report – Humanistic Photography, Abstraction, Nature, and Ignatius^*11.

Making Collaboration a Question of Authorship

Their photographs do not make the question of who pressed the shutter central to viewing. In its 2013 exhibition, the Moravian Gallery treated “collaboration” itself, alongside individual series, as a concern running through their method^*6. The exhibition catalog likewise organizes the work around three axes: photographic genres, exhibition, and collaboration^*13. Their shared authorship, which does not center the signature on an individual point of view, corresponds to the restraint of the images and weakens the habit of reading a photograph as a confession of its maker’s inner life.

Why the Series Matters: Avoiding the Isolated Single Image

For the duo, a series is not simply a style for arranging impassive photographs in a uniform format. They explain that a “field” or “phenomenon” has to be investigated step by step and that making an isolated, self-contained photograph is difficult for them to imagine^*25. They also describe the deliberate clouding of meaning—so that a work can be “misread”—as a basic pillar of their production, avoiding the consolidation of the work into one correct interpretation^*25. Together, these statements clarify why the series is necessary. A single photograph can easily become a strong symbolic image of its subject; a series accumulates differences, exceptions, repetitions, and boredom among similar pictures, forcing viewers to notice the photographic genres and social categories through which they are reading the images.

Abstraction: How a Photograph of Something Real Comes to Look “Abstract”

Abstraction (1994–96) presents stains on floors, walls, light, and fragments of objects—things that physically exist—as sharp black-and-white photographs. Galerie Rudolfinum situates the series within the ways Czech photography from 1990 to 2010 transformed the medium itself^*8. MoCP explains that, by photographing clearly representational subjects while imitating the visual language of abstract photography, the work exposes the codes through which “abstraction” is recognized^*1.

Abstraction depends on photography’s tendency to be received as a record of something that “was there.” Instead of transforming the subject into an abstract painting, the duo photographs real surfaces directly and creates the moment at which the resulting image is classified as abstraction. Because photography’s documentary character collides with the conventions of an art genre, the work returns viewers to the rules of classification they use without thinking. An ARTMargins review likewise places the duo in an exhibition that approached contemporary Czech photography through its institutions and conventions more than through the question of what was depicted^*19.

Ignatius and Landscapes: Using Heritage and Landscape Photography from Within

Ignatius – Photography of Historical Sights (1996–2002) and Landscapes – County Photography (1998–2000) borrow the visual vocabulary used to “properly” record heritage sites and regional landscapes. VVP AVU material shows that institutional genre names such as “historical-sights photography” and “county photography” are built into the series titles themselves^*11. PhotoRevue describes their work as repeatedly probing photographic canons—architecture, heritage, reportage, abstraction, and landscape—through restraint and humor^*16.

Uniform, frontal photography does not erase judgments of value; it shows how those judgments arise from photographic form. A commonplace building can look like “heritage” worthy of preservation when photographed with the conventions of a historical-site record, while a familiar landscape distance can attach regional meaning to suburbs or vacant ground. By keeping the mismatch between subject and form slight, the duo quietly unsettles the authority viewers expect from a genre label.

Making the Relation Between Shooting Site and Exhibition Site Part of the Work

At NoD Gallery in 2025, the duo spoke during installation about how meaning can arise from the combination of where a photograph was made and where it is exhibited^*7. An exhibition at Galerie Závodný connected the material traces of analog photography to placement in the gallery, treating photographs as responsive to spatial conditions instead of isolated wall images^*9. PLATO Ostrava likewise explains how their use and disruption of established photographic genres extends into the structure of the exhibition itself^*10.

From Pragensia to Brussels Sprouts: Reading the Signs of Cities and Institutions

Pragensia (1986–90) is an important early work that approaches tourist Prague as a sequence of fragments accumulated in the street. The dates of the series and its later cataloging are documented by both SVIT and VVP AVU^*3. In the later Brussels Sprouts (2007), their attention shifts toward the visual forms through which design, exhibition, and institutions represent a nation or culture. MoCP compares the work with Louise Lawler’s institutional critique and notes the irony embedded in codes of national representation^*1.

From the earliest work onward, the duo repeatedly reproduces established social modes of “showing” things with a slightly excessive fidelity. A Masaryk University bibliographic record for Colour Photography (2010) indicates that the color still-life series again addressed collaboration and the boundary between photography and art^*15. In Colour Photography, color itself becomes another means of testing the rules of a photographic genre.

Na bílém papíře: Everyday Objects and Life in 1989

In Na bílém papíře (literally, “on white paper”) (1989), passports, banknotes, clothing, food, and other objects are photographed against a white background. Their combinations evoke travel, work, identity, consumption, and other aspects of life at the time. Pavel Vančát discusses the fourteen color photographs as an early work that uses still-life conventions to make unexpected connections among fragments of everyday Czechoslovak life, placing it before the mismatched matter-of-factness between objects and photographic representation developed later in Vtipy and Abstraction^*26.

According to the artists, the white paper served as a “sterile” background that removed objects from their surroundings, while adjacent objects—such as a passport and coffee—were given relations that evoke situations from everyday life^*25. From the beginning, they reduced contextual background and created conditions in which meaning emerged from relations within a sequence. The later method of examining how photographic genres themselves guide interpretation in Abstraction and Churches, Churches is already visible here.

Churches, Churches: Typology and Social Traces

Churches, Churches (2012) is a series of contemporary churches in Poland photographed in succession. Culture.pl’s image gallery presents a substantial group of the coolly repetitive architectural images^*20. Galeria Arsenał describes their method as spanning documentary and conceptual photography, combining the appearance of a trustworthy record with an ironic distance from the subject^*21.

Seeing church architecture repeatedly through the same method makes it possible to compare the forms through which religion, regional architecture, and public space persisted in post-socialist society. GHMP’s J/P/K exhibition likewise identifies repetition, series, and archives as basic tools of the duo, describing their engagement with relics, history, and time in the post-socialist sphere through a distance shaped by nostalgia and irony^*4.

Photobooks and Catalogs: Media for Reading Sequences Rather Than Single Images

Their work is more readily understood through series and publications than through a single representative photograph. A 2013 monograph from JRP|Ringier / tranzit.cz brings together long-term series in one volume, and D.A.P. lists it as a major monograph on the photographic duo^*18. The Moravian Gallery catalog published the same year appeared as a 106-page exhibition publication; library records specify that it covers photographs from 1986 to 2013^*14. The 2019 GHMP catalog for J/P/K was also published in Czech and English, reflecting a reception in which the series move back and forth between exhibition and print^*12.

10 000: Deliberately Making “Photographic Photographs” the Old-Fashioned Way

10 000 (1987–2010) is a series governed by an almost excessive rule: photographing the counter of an open-reel tape recorder from 0 to 9999. When the work was completed, the duo said that it would make no sense to use an efficient contemporary output; it had to be realized through a “completely old-fashioned photographic route” using old photographic paper and glossy processing^*25. More than the numbers themselves, the labor and material procedure of repeatedly producing small glossy photographs became the core of the work. The historical object called “a photograph” is itself made a subject. A concept that could have existed as a list or database is deliberately bound back to the time, paper, and processing of analog photography, showing how consistently the duo has addressed the conventions and materials that produce the appearance of “photographicness” as well as photographic content.

Beyond Deadpan as Mere Impassivity

Their images are restrained enough to be described as deadpan, but they do not pursue an affectless objectivism. The Moravian Gallery argues that, from the beginning of their careers, they have fundamentally reconsidered how photography is used and redefined its premises with each new body of work^*6. A 2010 exhibition review similarly identifies their thorough engagement with banality and their gently mischievous treatment of established photographic canons as characteristic of the work^*16.

The humor emerges from a structure in which stricter adherence to the grammar of “proper documentary photography” makes the mismatch between subject and institution more conspicuous. An Art+Antiques interview shows the duo treating decisions about works, collaboration, and exhibitions as practical conversations rather than expressions of a fixed myth of authorship^*17. Cool description itself becomes a critical method.

Within Czech Photographic History: Using Photography to Examine Its Own Genres

In Czech art after 1989, the transformation of social institutions coincided with a reexamination of what photography could prove and what it presented as art. MoCP’s 50% Grey traced this change across several generations and treated Jasanský/Polák as major artists directly engaging the conventions of the medium^*1. GHMP’s 2019 exhibition summarized repetition, seriality, and the archive as basic means of expression for a remarkably stable collaboration lasting more than three decades^*5.

One of their important contributions to photographic history is the refusal to oppose documentary and conceptual photography. At the moment when a record looks most “ordinary,” they read the institutions and tastes that make that ordinariness legible. Without depicting major events, their work repeatedly asks how streets, churches, villages, walls, and everyday objects become “history,” “heritage,” “abstraction,” or “landscape” through photographic arrangement. Their photographs examine, from within photographic culture, what gets selected as a record worth preserving rather than illustrating post-socialist memory directly.

Shared Authorship, Copying, and Repetition: Another Line of Czech Postmodernism

Art historian Karel Císař reconsiders the duo around 1989 beyond a strictly Czech photographic context, relating the seriality, shared authorship, and direct appropriation of Kresby and Na bílém papíře to Rosalind Krauss’s discussions of copies, reproduction, and the repeatability of signs^*27. He does not present this as a claim of direct influence. Instead, he frames the work as a “local response” to poststructuralist postmodernism emerging in Czech art at the time and connects it to debates about photography’s “expanded field” and the “anti-photography” of the 1970s^*27.

Císař’s research also examines why the duo’s early work did not fit easily into the category of “postmodernism” as it became established in Czech art history. He cites later exhibitions and catalogs in which their work was removed from postmodern sections and placed in separate chapters^*27. A history organized primarily around stylistic changes in painting and sculpture made photographic operations such as collaboration, seriality, and copying harder to see. The restraint of these images also carries late-1980s questions about photographic authorship, originals, and the series as an institution.

In Relation to Bernd and Hilla Becher: Different Uses of Typology

Bernd and Hilla Becher The resemblance lies in central perspective, the absence of figures, and cool description that avoids dramatic skies or theatrical effects. Yet the origins and purposes of the two methods differ. Jasanský and Polák explicitly state that they did not know the Bechers when they used in Pragensia a form later read as Becher-like^*25. Critic Josef Chuchma acknowledges the similarity while stressing the difference: the Bechers typologized monumental industrial structures under standardized conditions, whereas Jasanský/Polák direct an equally cool surface toward Czech small towns, suburbs, and vacant lots, producing irony through the gap between the seeming insignificance of the subject and the rigor of the photographic form^*23. The visual restraint may be similar, but typology serves different functions. The Bechers’ typologies create comparability; in Jasanský/Polák, even photography’s judgment about what is worth comparing becomes unstable.

SVIT exhibition material credits the duo with applying conceptual procedures to ordinary, inconspicuous situations since the late 1980s and with reconsidering photography’s position within contemporary Czech art^*22. A substantial 2012 publication similarly identifies typological series, paradoxes of the photographic image, the performative character of working as a duo, and deadpan humor as long-term features^*24. Where the Bechers’ method placed subjects under identical conditions to make formal differences comparable, Jasanský/Polák use the very form of classification as an apparatus for examining how land, institutions, public space, and cultural signs come to appear “ordinary” within Czech society.

Chlapi and Český člověk: Accidental Social Images over Typological Precision

Chuchma places Chlapi alongside Český člověk by Jan Malý, Jiří Poláček, and Ivan Lutterer, as well as the tradition of Irving Penn’s typological portraits, while emphasizing the differences. Český člověk gathers people under standardized conditions; Chlapi encounters men in the street in an almost reportage-like manner, using the series to show how the category “men” bundles heterogeneous people together rather than pursuing photographic perfection^*23. The typology of Chlapi exposes the roughness of the category itself instead of completing an orderly system.