Photographer Jan Malý is exhibiting at the Leica gallery

Prague - The gallery Leica has prepared a retrospective of the photographer Jan Malý, a documentary filmmaker and one of the authors of the extensive project Czech Man. Among his most prominent series are recordings of the environment of the Prague gaming house U Nováků and the Jazz Club Reduta from the mid-70s. "They rank among the most vibrant images of the time and combine a healthy social reflex, the insight of a trained eye, and the courage to take risks," said the exhibition's curator Pavel Vančát to journalists.
Malý's last solo exhibition was organized by Anna Fárová in 1980, which makes the author's retrospective exhibition at Leica a long-overdue repayment of a debt to this unpretentious and original author, he added. The showcase is titled Torso/Retrospective, in reference to an event that marked its preparation. Nearly the entire photographer's archive ended up in a landfill during this time, and is therefore lost.
Malý stated that he owed rent to the owner of the space where he had his studio. The owner claimed he would take the items to storage, but they ended up in the landfill. Malý filed a criminal complaint against him, but he was not allowed to search for the negatives and photographs at the landfill; he estimates the damages in the millions of crowns.
Fifty-nine-year-old Jan Malý belongs to the first generation of graduates from the photography department at Prague's FAMU (1973 to 1978); according to Vančát, although he made less of a mark, his photos are all the more sensitive, modest, and "earthy" in their own way. The author works with thoughtfulness and seriousness, which has nearly disappeared from the photographic craft, he stated. His series are not built on superficial attractiveness, but on understanding and insight, interwoven with amused irony and, at times, subtle melancholy.
Since the 1980s, at the urging of Rostislav Švácha and Petr Wittlich, Malý has also focused on documenting the then-overlooked pre-war architecture, as the exhibition also proves. His photographs of Art Nouveau, Cubist, and Functionalist architecture against the backdrop of normalization's grayness possess not only professional brilliance but also a subtle irony. Architectural photography has become a lifelong interest for Malý, to which he is still dedicated today.
Together with Jiří Poláček and Ivan Lutterer, he has been a co-author of the extensive series of large-format portraits Czech Man since 1982. The resulting archive, which is constantly being updated, presents a sociologically and ethnographically invaluable study of Czechs and their gradually changing appearances. Due to the renowned nature of the series, it is represented symbolically by one photograph at the exhibition.
In the 1990s, for Malý, returns to independent work means dramatic black-and-white shots of the shoreline from French Brittany (1992) and especially the series On the Road (1990 and 1991), capturing the bizarrely awkward beginnings of Czech capitalism through the figures of vendors and makeshift stalls along the roads.