CGD

Mojmír Bureš was asked in an interview five years ago who his favorite artists were, and he mentioned two names whose works could not stand farther apart: Libuše Jarcovjáková and Jeff Wall. On the one hand, we have a photographer characterized by her diary-like spontaneity and no-filter approach to the sphere of the personal and intimate who recorded life with all its ups and downs; on the other, we have a hyper-intellectual and perfectionist artist whose work left little space for accident. Bureš is interested in both these positions and tries to reconcile them in his work.

His artistic works are something of a visual diary but they also adopt the line of conceptual projects that symbolically process the violent past of various regions. For one of these projects, he has even been shortlisted for the Circa x Dazed Class 2021 project and his name shone bright above London’s Piccadilly Circus, Tokyo’s Yunika Vision and Seoul’s K-Pop Square.

The photographs of the collection by Robert Wun (whom Bureš has known since his studies at the London Royal College of Art) were taken backstage at his show in Théâtre du Châtelet during the Paris Fashion Week. This collection is characterized by the fusion of a carefully prepared event with its unexpected moments. “For a photographer, the backstage of a fashion show is a very interesting environment. The situation is very finely arranged and all that is left is to find the right moments,” explains Bureš. This groomed environment provides him the opportunity to find unkempt situations. In the case of the Robert Wun show, he captured them on old-school cine film.

Bureš started doing fashion photography already in his early years at FAMU when he basically became the court photographer for LAFORMELA and he collaborates with the company to this day. Between 2017 and 2021, he was furthermore head photographer for the Mercedes-Benz Prague Fashion Week. Rather than the show itself, he has always been drawn to the preparations for perfect execution and the emotions which go along with that: “I love the tension during the performance,” he says about the atmosphere among the models. “And I am most fascinated by their transformation when they come back from the catwalk and just let it all out.”

Pavel Turek