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Photographer of the Year
Dušan Tománek
Although it may seem at first sight that the design of the double album of the Priessnitz rock group, Weightlessness, is based on the antithesis between the refined graphic design by Petr Babák and Matěj Hanauer from the Laboratory studio and the straightforward aesthetics of the photographs by Dušan Tománek, the contrary is the truth: the refined aspect here is the aesthetics, and the thing which turned straightforward is the concept. Because the designers Babák and Hanauer limited themselves to a simple gesture, completely leaving the artistic rendition of the two covers up to the group members and thus, in harmony with the music, returned them to the primal childhood experiences, as the frontman had put it, while Tománek conceived shooting at the concerts as the musicians merely representing a partial fragment of formally complex compositions, the emptiness of which rather refers to the end than to the beginning, and therefore also to the fact that the album in play is the group's last one. This is well apparent mainly from the photographs shot at the Café V lese concert in December 2016. The photographer not only observed it from a distance as usual and preferred to focus his lens on the audience rather than the musicians in order to best capture the atmosphere of the moment; due to the low view from below, his takes are moreover often dominated by the empty surface of the ceiling. This is not only the case of the almost abstract photograph where the diagonal composition - again taken from below - pushes the singer's face far to the edge, but also of the poster photograph where the frontman disappears behind the wall of overflashed fans' bodies. The musicians are everywhere overshadowed in order to give space to minute details, such as a kissing couple in the foreground or a bottle toppled over and spilling water on the stage. Figuratively, these details can also be interpreted as a visual opposite to the purely acoustical, fading feedback of electric guitars, which is at the same time the best possible metaphor of the ending of a rock group.
Karel Císař