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Photographer of the Year
Václav Jirásek
2015 was the year that it finally made sense for the film festival at the spa town of Karlovy Vary to become a nine-day event. The campaign design, logically, featured a spa cup and a metal cane badge. Studio Najbrt, however, downplays this absurd typographic memory of imaginary bygone days with the present-day fans who create the festival's unique democratic atmosphere, the recent winners and their chauffeurs. Over the past four years, Václav Jirásek has taken a thousand such photos at his mobile studio, in queues in front of cinemas and at black-tie parties. As an avid collector of portrait photos of cosplay fans and demonstrators for the legalisation of cannabis, he originally took the festival photos for himself. But he later started to coordinate them with the identity of the jubilee year in mind. One of his key festival posters depicts 431 portraits and more were shown during the 50th festival year on dozens of screens at the Thermal Hotel. The jury admired the scope of meaning, ambiguity, functionality and intensive focus of the project. Jirásek, who studied painting and is a fan of Catholic art, doesn't care about glam or who's sexy or stylish, and turns a blind eye to the fashion and social hierarchy of the film ecosystem both in Karlovy Vary and the Czech Republic. His interests are wide- ranging, whether it be capturing the delicate and intimate body language of a student, a person's profile and giddy excitement in an evocation of a medieval painting, or an embarrassing theatrical gesture made in front of the camera. Jirásek is interested in celebrities only in so far as they are equals of those hidden in the dark of the cinema auditorium – in so far as they provide further evidence of our weird existence. With the festival's events masked in a grey background (the type of event can only be guessed at based on the clothes individual people are wearing), Jirásek portrays the festival as a cast list for an outstanding sitcom. And as we soon see, for him both the festival and life itself are in fact one big sitcom.
Michal Nanoru