Evžen Sobek
Evzen Sobek has a firm place in the spectrum of Czech documentary photography. In his freshmen years at the Institute of Creative Photography at Silesia University he attracted attention with his sensitive documentary about the life of monks from Premonstratensian monastery in Zeliva. He expressed himself as one of the most outstanding participants of the broad photographic project “People of Hlucin region of 90s of 20th Century”, where he proved that he has his own personal author’s manuscript style.
His next cycle from the life of Brno’s Romany community was quite different from most of the documentary collections with a Roma theme, which either show a traditional and personal lifestyle of this specific group of our fellow citizens with quite a romantic viewpoint, or on the other hand, focus only on naturalistic documentary and their social inadaptability. Sobek achieved, certainly under Jindrich Streit’s influence, to make with his subjects contact, full of mutual understanding and many times to capture them in quite intimate situations. In his cycle, he tried to present a complex view, in which next to raw pictures of Roma from the outskirts of society he has slightly exotic shots of Roma buildings and a funeral. He also places photographs of successful Roma businessmen or moments from everyday family life, he shows that these people are only different from other fellow citizens due to their slightly darker skin. An even stronger generalizing character of Sobek’s photographs is after all the fact that many pictures from the cycle “Roma in the city of Brno” became part of thematically more free collection “Ecce Home”, in which the author’s subjective view is even more evident.
Sobek in this cycle left his firmly defined theme from a concrete environment and began to look for metaphorical meanings, which are in regular reality phantasms, by highlighting and artful image composition. In a still-not-finished collection Sobek has expanded his themes by some impressive photographs from his travels in France, Portugal, Japan and Israel, and also from a domestic environment. Not all of them feature people. On one of his best pictures, we see a monkey sitting in front of a cracked wall trying to escape from an area defined by a chain, or a broken chair unstably standing on three legs somewhere in the middle of a road next to shadows of people, about whose appearance, age, or mutual relationship we know nothing. Even these works symbolically tell a story about loneliness, people’s characteristics, a thirst for freedom and other general themes. It is done in a very subjective and artistically vycizelovanou form, which emphasizes the fact that photography is visual art and not literature.
In 2000 Evzen Sobek not only successfully graduated with a masters degree from the Institute of Creative Photography with his selection of pictures from the cycle “Ece Homo” and an excellent theoretical dissertation about Czech photographic theory from the 1920s – 40’s, but he also received an important international award – the main prize in competition of young photographs up to 35 years MiO Photo Award 200 in Osaka, Japan. This has confirmed Sobek´s standing internationally.
