CGD

The most recent portfolio of the photographer Michaela Karásek Čejková seems to display the same concept via which she had profiled herself during her studies at the Film and TV Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. This is when she developed her specific visual style, based on employing photographic collage composed of hand-made cutouts rearranged into new wholes. This method perfectly complies with Čejková's characteristic use of symbols and her surrealistically tuned scenes, when the main subject merely has the form of hints and some kind of a parable. The medium of collage helps the artist, in her own words, cope with the process of a photograph's origination, when the result is the work of a camera and manual processing of the material is absent. All the above-mentioned is apparent in both the commercial commissions and projects which earned Čejková her nomination for the Photographer of the Year. The jury acknowledged her peculiar and integral morphology present throughout her hitherto produced works. These include the collages accompanying and reflecting the individual recipes in the 4x7 cookbook and the collages from The Richness of Czech Cuisine series, published by Soffa. It is also the photographs for the Chamaleo album by the Czech musician, Never Sol, and the photographs for the most recent collection, HOMA, by the jewellery maker Janja Prokić, where Čejková – in harmony with the collection's spirit – transformed models wearing the individual items into birdlife species populating Papua New Guinea.

Monika Čejková