Vojta Dukát

ISBN: 978-80-7215-463-0|Published: 2013|Pages: 144
Binding: Softbound|Format: 160 x 180 mm|Graphic design: studio Najbrt

A Moravian photographer, Vojta Dukát (b. 1947), went into exile in the Netherlands after Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Soviet Army in August 1968. He then wandered the world and excelled in humanist photography. He continues to try and be a professional amateur, true to the Lubitel camera. He does not work systematically. He haunts places where he can find harmonic relations towards things and nature in the company of his fellow human beings. He likes to chat with people who are unstressed by the notion that time is money. In 1974 and 1976, he was a Nominee of Magnum Photos in Paris. Since the mid-1980s, he has limited his photography in order to concentrate on video recordings. He was awarded the Capi-Lux Alblas Prize, in 1997, and the Pieter Ouborg Prize, in 2001, for his long-term contribution to the visual arts. The articles in this monograph, Dukát’s second, are by Antonín Dufek, an art historian and curator emeritus of the photography collection at the Moravian Gallery in Brno, Melchior de Wolff, T. S. Gottlieb, and Vojta Dukát.

It is frustrating for me to look at Dukát’s photographs because I can't name “it” – that which is distinctive about them, what unites them and how they are different from Frank, from Klein, from Koudelka. They are about people – working class mostly. […] The pictures are hard, but not unkind. […] Social concerns and human emotions are paramount and these are complex […] His subjects are in public but with private thoughts and passions; and conducting tasks performed so daily as to be ritual for that person. Photographers, curators, editors, and critics can see these pictures and recognize how hard it is to make such simple pictures. The public looks through the craft onto the subject as onto a mirror of their own experience. Anne Wilkes Tucker, 1989