In the second episode of the NET podcast series, we interviewed photographer Tereza Zelenkova, who has professional ties in the art network, especially abroad. You will find out how she perceives the position of contemporary art photography in the international context and what kind of photographic work is missing in our region.
Tereza Zelenková is a Czech photographer originally from Opava. She studied photography at the University of Westminster and then at the Royal College of Art in London. Tereza Zelenková has exhibited in many prestigious galleries and won several major international awards and her work is represented in prestigious international collections. She now moves mainly between the UK and the Czech Republic, currently living in Prague.
“The question of the relationship between painting and photography and different media in the art scene is an interesting one, I think painting is a medium that generally sells better than photography because it is always de facto a unique object, whereas photography, basically since its birth, has been constantly struggling with reproducibility, which is often problematic from the collector’s point of view,” Tereza Zelenková sums up in the first part of the interview, the main historical disadvantage of photography.
In the context of the current overwhelming of the world with photography through the internet, social networks and digital screens, Tereza Zelenková answers positively: “Photography is greatly helped by the fact that it is an integral part of our everyday life, in its incredibly many positions and forms, but at the same time I think it also tempts us to constantly fetishize technological innovation. Artists and institutions themselves are now looking for subjects and artists who are mainly concerned with technological innovation … and the more traditional form of photography is seen as something nostalgic and essentially uninteresting, but I think that’s a shame because photography is not just about the medium and its use in society.”
Zelenková sees untapped potential in photography, for example, in the possibility of combining photography and text, which offers additional layers of meaning to images. “That longevity is something that interests me, especially in a world where we consume images quickly in a matter of seconds,” she says of her work on her original publications.
