Vladimir Birgus
Vladimir Birgus (CZ, 1954) is a photographer, curator, historian of photography, professor and head of the Institute of Creative Photography at the Silesian University in Opava. His photographs have been exhibited in around 70 solo exhibitions and have been included in many collections (for instance Museum of Decorative Art in Prague, Moravian Gallery in Brno, Olomouc Art Museum, Silesian Museum in Katowice, Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Maison Européene de la Photographie, Paris, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography). He is the author and co-author of 40 books, including Tschechoslowakische Fotografie der Gegenwart (Cologne and Heidelberg 1990), Czech Photographic Avant-Garde 1918-1948 (Prague and Stuttgart 1999, Cambridge and London 2002), Photographer František Drtikol (Prague 2000), Jaroslav Rössler – Czech Avant-Garde Photographer (Prague, Cambridge and London 2003), Tschechische Fotografie des 20er Jahrhunderts / Czech Photography of the 20th Century (Bonn 2009, Prague 2010), Czech Photography in Dates, 1839-2019 (Prague, 2021). He has curated and co-curated number of exhibitions in many museums and galleries, for instance Modern Beauty: Czech Photographic Avant-Garde 1918-1948 (Barcelona, Paris, Lausanne, Prague, Munich 1998-1999), Czech Photography of the 20th Century (Prague 2005, Bonn 2009), The Intimate World of Josef Sudek (Paris and Ottawa, 2016-2017) and Avant-Garde Photographer Jaromír Funke (Prague and Paris, 2017, Frankfurt and Olomuc, 2018).
As a photographer, he has gained an international reputation, and has shown his works in dozens of exhibitions at home and abroad, and his photographs are in a number of important collections. Since the late 1970s, he has systematically expanded his series of photographs called Something Unspeakable, in which he organically links elements of socially concerned documentary photography with a subjective view. His photographs are enriched with many visual metaphors and symbols, whose psychological and emotional meanings are underscored by the symbolic use of color photography. His photographs include existential and dramatic scenes from the streets of big European cities against the background of everyday life and slowly moving history.
