Literature and Photography: Media’s Quest to Decipher the Mystery of the Everyday

This article examines the intersection of literature and photography, focusing on their ability to capture everyday life. It explores the evolution of photography in 1930s and 1940s Czech culture, a period marked by aesthetic debates about its legitimacy as art. By analysing the works of Miroslav Há...

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Published inMetacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory Vol. 10; no. 2; pp. 185 - 205
Main Authors Bubeníček, Petr, Vokřínek, Petr
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cluj-Napoca Babeș-Bolyai University 01.12.2024
Universitatea Babeş-Bolyai
Faculty of Letters, UBB
Subjects
Aesthetics
Avant-garde
Comparative Study of Literature
Consciousness
Constructivism
Cultural change
Cultural groups
Culture
Czech Literature
Film adaptations
Fine Arts / Performing Arts
Language and Literature Studies
Literary criticism
Ontology
Painters
Photography
Semantics
Studies of Literature
Surrealism
Visual artists
Photography
Miroslav Hák
Intermediality
Literature
Modernity
Jiří Kolář
Everyday Life
Existentialism
Online AccessGet full text
ISSN2457-8827
DOI10.24193/mjcst.2024.18.09.

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Summary:This article examines the intersection of literature and photography, focusing on their ability to capture everyday life. It explores the evolution of photography in 1930s and 1940s Czech culture, a period marked by aesthetic debates about its legitimacy as art. By analysing the works of Miroslav Hák and Jiří Kolář, the article highlights a paradigm shift from traditional “great art” to an appreciation of the mundane. The fascination with the banal, which was transformed into art through various, most often surrealist, methods, had already manifested itself in Czech culture. Still, it was not until the establishment of Art Group 42 that the every day and the mundane were used to express existentialist reflections. Hák and Kolář introduced into Czech culture a new type of sensibility for reality in that they did not hide reality or dull its edges through lyricism. For them, it was more important to recognise just what kind of world we live in. Thus, the stimulus for their poetic creations was not necessarily artistic in nature, but ontological: Who are we, where do we live, and how are we supposed to grasp and understand these facts?
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ISSN:2457-8827
DOI:10.24193/mjcst.2024.18.09.