50 Years of the Department of Photography FAMU: Exercises from the Archive

FAMU’s Department of Photography celebrates its 50^th anniversary with an exhibition that takes a fresh approach, looking back to the moment of its creation and its formative early years. Spanning the period 1967 – 1974, the show recalls the origins of the Photography Section within what was then the Department of Film Photography (now the Department of Cinematography), and especially the period after 1975, when Professor Ján Šmok’s efforts led to the founding of the independent Department of Photography. Rather than presenting a “greatest hits” selection, the exhibition focuses on the training system and specific exercises that shaped the first generations of graduates and that, even during the difficult period of normalization, managed to preserve space for creative freedom. The exhibition, therefore, presents the department through examples of these exercises from the Department of Photography Archive in the Beroun Studio, as well as from the archive of final works held at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague. The timeline ends around the year 2000, when the arrival of digital photography brought an end to the systematic archiving of student practical exercises. For a view of the department’s current form, visitors are invited to a parallel exhibition at GAMU Gallery.

Curators: Martin Stecker a Jan Havel