„In the cycle Eyes of the Ill I am trying to visualize feelings of ill people lying for example fevered, stricken by apoplexy or in states when they are half unconscious, simply the way they perceive their surroundings through their illness. My concern is to draw the spectator into the picture the contents of which can hardly be expressed in words and to unveil to a healthy man who perhaps has never got to know hospital environment what all an ill person can sense, see and experience."

Vít Šimánek

Only a few Czech photographers of the younger generation have devoted themselves to something so financially unrewarding as documentary photography with such stubborn persistence and single-minded interest, for such a long period of time, and with such excellent results as the thirty year-old Vít Šimánek. He has worked on some of his series for many years, sometimes abandoning them for a time to devote himself to other things, but returning with renewed zeal. This is true for instance of the extensive series Republic of Žižkov, which he has gradually developed since the mid-nineties. Vít Šimánek himself does not come from the Žižkov district, but is familiar with this neighborhood of workers, Roma, and Ukrainian illegals as well as young bohemians, having worked for a long time as a medical orderly in the local hospital. He photographs intensely in the Žižkov pubs, at the local football team Viktorka's matches, in the backyards of Žižkov tenement houses, in Žižkov's streets, during the Žižkov Carnival, and in the flats of the several Žižkovites whose confidence he has gradually gained. Little by little, he has put together a partly nostalgic, partly bizarre, partly humorous and partly somber picture of this specific Prague neighborhood, that has the concrete level of a sociological documentary about the overlapping of the traditional lifestyle of a working-class neighborhood with the unified lifestyle of a present-day metropolis, while it also retains a more universal level, where it does not in fact really matter when and where the pictures were taken. Most recently, Šimánek presented his perspective on Žižkov last year at a joint exhibition with his colleague from the group Rovnýma nohama (Deep End) Karel Tůma, a student of photography at FAMU in Prague.

Another subject that Šimánek has been working on for a long time is the life of the Roma community. Though he treats this subject primarily in his photography, he has also written an excellent theoretical diploma work about Roma motives in Czech photography as his graduation work at the Institute of Creative Photography of the Silesian University in Opava He also depicts the Roma, under the unforgettable influence of Josef Koudelka, with some degree of romanticism, but rather than looking for the specific features of their life he searches for a concentrated form of elementary human values.

Last but not least, a third large subject for Šimánek is the hospital, an environment where he spends a considerable amount of time almost daily. In the Žižkov hospital he created not only a number of black-and-white humanist photographs, sensitively and with great aesthetic cultivation showing pain, old age and illness, and at the same time human sympathy and an ability to help the needy - but also an exceptionally strong image of the ruthless passage of time in his comparisons of present-day portraits of patients with their aged identification photographs. Recently he decided to take color photographs in the hospital. Gradually, he created the series Eyes of the Ill (Pohledy nemocných), composed of expressively unfocussed shots, suggesting the perspective on the hospital environment through the eyes of the sick. Some photographs as it were show the hands, feet and other details of the bodies of the observers, others capture hospital corridors, a carafe of tea, or a Christmas tree through the prism of their feverish eyes, while others are almost abstract and unfocused patterns. Šimánek's originality lies in being able to exploit the psychological aspects of various colors, which enrich the already emotionally strong shots and add another dimension. It is evident that with Eyes of the Ill he has created his best work so far, joining together in a completely contemporary form the features of humanistic photo-reportage with those of the subjective documentary, as well as with aspects of art and documentary photography.

Vladimír Birgus

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