Reflection

"In 1985, Pavel Baňka's photographs reached viewers in the United States through an issue of the German magazine Album. Perhaps this is where I first saw the memorable photograph of the reclining nude with a thin metal wire arching from her navel to a metal band on her forehead. With her eyes closed and her back arched, she seems to be in a trance or in ecstasy. The wire and the light behind her suggest a field of energy radiating from the curving terrain of her body. In this image, and in other pictures in this series, where Baňka collaborated with Czech jewellery artist Vratislav K. Novák, the human body serves as a stage for enigmatic dramas. There is no pretense that the photographer has documented found realities. Clearly invented and staged, the pictures visualize dreams, or literary illusions, such as the reference to the Swift's country of Lilliput evoked by a tiny ladder resting on a sleeping woman's forehead in Ladder (1986). As Baňka wanted to be a writer before he was a photographer, his empathy for fiction and poetic imagery is not surprising. [...] Throughout his career, Baňka's photographic series have alternated between imagined and found Spiritual Spaces are a mature artist's successful realization of investigations first pursued fifteen years earlier when Baňka also sought to animate plain, interior spaces. In a series titled Doubts, Baňka more actively imposes his vision by selectively placing long narrrowed panels of glass and mirrors in rooms that are without furniture or people. The plain domestic spaces are deconstructed by conflicting sources of light and shadow and by the vertical bands of reflections created by the mirrors and glass that slice through the interiors. Images of trees and plants from the exterior enter the interior; perspectives shift, and solid surfaces are dissolved by the light flickering across walls and floors. These early pictures are fascinating and beautiful, and as with Baňka's other early photographic series, the photographer's hand in their invention is clear." Extract from the essay Pavel Baňka - Haunting Duality by Anne Wilkes Tucker, Curator, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, USA. If we tried to imagine Pavel Baňka's creative life as a photograph, its inherently transient nature would probably show very soon. There would be a steady stream of portraits, staged figurative actions, spaces artificially created by the artist himself, images verging on the abstract, as well as landscapes and interiors with a spiritual dimension. Such an imaginary picture would then suggest a host of frameworks within which Baňka's work might be arranged, based on various inner and external criteria - just as the motive of the frame itself keeps recurring throughout Baňka's work. A biographical angle would show that ever since his beginnings as a self-taught photographer, Baňka has retained his determination to search and invent, thus keeping at bay any danger of artistic stagnation, while always putting new approaches to the test. Within the framework of Czech photography, Baňka's place would be somewhere behind the founding father figure of Jan Sudek, whom he also references in his early works, and alongside Jan Svoboda, with whom he also shares an interest in the work of renowned Czech glass and jewellery artists. In Baňka's nudes and some of the portraits, we can also find traces of another giant of Czech photography, Frantisek Drtikol. Just as with Drtikol, Baňka's main objective is not creating a mere image of the subject, but rather constructing a photographic picture, where the photographed figure or face act only as a fully integrated, yet at the same time provocative, part of the whole. In Baňka's photographs, a piece of jewellery does not function as a mere decoration of the model but rather as an extension of their body and an expression of their mood. With each small prop, the spatial dimensions and inner meaning of the portrait shift. Another framework is constructed virtually from within, and it delineates the various periods or areas of interest within Baňka's work. The monograph which is being put together and which focuses (mainly) on Baňka's early work is divided into three such areas, entitled Construction, Figuration, and Abstraction. The title Construction refers to the way an image is constructed by light. Baňka photographs panels of mirrors placed in a landscape, he opens windows, thus reflecting and focusing the view into the interior. The mechanisms of light shining through or being reflected, as captured in Baňka's photographs refine both the vision and the awareness of space. As Anne Wilkes Tucker puts it, each one of Baňka's photographs simultaneously facilitates recognition while undermining the faithfulness of the medium. In his kinetic, phased figurative pictures, Baňka's wife, his daughter, or he himself then become the protagonists of a few-second long photographic actions: a simple movement creates a sequence, interconnecting personal and general levels. Other photographs play out almost on the surface so to speak. The term Abstraction is not used to suggest the notion that images lose their descriptiveness - rather, they shed the shackles of exact contours, becoming blurry and gaining evocativeness. In his experiments with exposure length, the immediate moment of a picture being taken is enriched by the time frame of the past as well as of the possible, just as Baňka himself seems to suggest when he speaks of 'recollections' and 'imaginations'.