Tono Stano

ISBN: 80-7215-247-5|Published: 2005|Pages: 128
Binding: Softbound|Format: 160 x 180 mm|Graphic design: Pavel Lev, Studio Najbrt
http://www.tonostano.com/

One of the best known photographers of his generation, Tono Stano was born in Zlaté Moravce, Slovakia, on 24 March 1960. He attended a secondary school of applied arts in Bratislava in 1975–79, and then the School of Film, Photography, and Television (FAMU), Prague, in 1980–86. He and his Slovak fellow-students at FAMU burst onto the Czech scene with staged photographs full of expressive movement and metaphor, partly influenced by performance art. Of this “Slovak Wave” Stano became the most striking figure on the two, now divided, developing art scenes (Slovak and Czech), while living permanently in Prague. From the playful exuberance and exaggeration of his early photographs he gradually worked his way to brilliant black-and-white photographs in which he uses shadow and light to turn the female nude into almost abstract forms that are provocative in their mysterious vagueness. In the early 1990s he staged his first nudes en plein air, which became his chief topic for the rest of the decade. He published some of the still unfinished, loosely conceived series of plein-air nudes at an exhibition entitled “Fascination” in 2001. His photograph Sense appears on the cover of W. A. Ewing’s The Body (London, Thames & Hudson, 1994), which discusses 150 years of photography around the world. Magdalena Juříková, author of the article in the current publication, is an art historian who for a number of years was Curator of Modern Sculpture at the National Gallery in Prague. She currently works at the Galerie Zlatá husa, Prague, as an expert on Modern and contemporary art.