The Czech Republic's capital city of Prague has long played a central role in the artistic culture of the Slavic sphere. From the late 1910s the city was in the forefront of dynamic cultural activity, becoming a hub for the burgeoning Czech avant-garde, and ever since has exerted a major influence throughout Europe, Russia, and elsewhere. In Japan, too, interest in Czech artistic culture, including crafts like book design, illustrated books and animation, has surged in recent years.

This exhibition, which focuses on the photographic expression that has played such an important role in Czech artistic culture, will introduce the work of ten of today's most representative modern Czech photographers.

Exhibited artists:
Vladimír Birgus • Václav Jirásek • Antonín Kratochvíl • Michal Macků • Dita Pepe • Ivan Pinkava • Rudo Prekop • Tono Stano • Jindřich Štreit • Tereza Vlčková

Through the works of these artists and the diverse photographic genres in which they pursue their craft, from portraiture and landscapes to montages and documentaries, this exhibit will look at the current state of modern Czech photography and explore the way it has cultivated new expression by continuously building upon a rich tradition and history that extends back to the dawn of photography.

Photographic technology came to Czechoslovakia in the 1830s, very soon after the advent of photography itself, and was quickly embraced by great numbers of new photographers. By 1900 photography had become an important expressive medium, with many talented photographers coming to the fore, among them the well known František Drtikol, Josef Sudek, Jan Saudek, and Josef Koudelka. Under the new freedom that followed the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, artistic culture from former Communist bloc countries exploded into the world at large, and Czech photography, too, rode this tide to garner broad recognition throughout the Western world. In 1998 and 1999, the exhibition Modern Beauty: Czech Avant-Garde Photography, 1918–1948 was shown to huge success in the cities of Barcelona, Paris, Lausanne, Prague, and Munich, helping to bring Czech photographic art even greater worldwide recognition. In 2005, another exhibition, Czech Photography of the 20th Century, was held in two locations in Prague, the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague and the City Gallery Prague. This exhibition, the first of its kind and scale in the Czech Republic, traced the history and development of twentieth-century Czech photography with its showing of about 1,300 works by over 400 Czechoslovakian photographers. In 2009, it traveled to the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn.

This exhibition, Darknesses for Light, is the first in Japan to explore the state of modern Czech photography and consider the unique expressiveness and high standards of quality that have earned it such strong worldwide recognition. Featuring roughly fifty works by ten of the most notable Czech photographers working today, it offers an in-depth look at Czech photography and its particular emphasis on the development of monochrome expression.

* The text provided by The Shiseido Gallery.

Opened dates; June 19 - August 8, 2010