Jozef Sedlák: Sometimes I am pleasantly surprised at how students are able to communicate the existential things of life through images.

Jožko, you have been teaching photography at UCM for a long time. You have formed friendships with many students that continue even after you have graduated from FMK. What is the reason for this?

I was simply lucky to have a profession that can connect people. Connecting and communicating is the very identity of photography, and if the relationship is tempered correctly, authentic friendships are created. When the faculty managed to establish the Communication Studio in the Medium of Photography (2013), students like Peter Lančarič, Eva Jonisová, Magdaléna Tomalová, Kristína Mayerová, Ivana Galat and many others came, for whom photography did not become just a problem of school duty or credits. On the contrary, they needed to create, express themselves through images and spend overtime discussing and thinking about photography and not only about it.

These facts modulated our mutual personal relationship, which lasted for a long time after graduation. Of course, this was also due to the fruitful period when we received grants from the FPU, thanks to which several creative workshops were held (Brehov, Hybe, Vyšné Ružbachy, Podolínec, Lomnička and others) and several exhibitions and book publications were added. The relationship between a teacher and a student does not depend only on the teacher. In the case of photography, the attitude of the student is also very important. Descartes's "I think, therefore I am" can be paraphrased as "I photograph, therefore I am". This attitude has the power to change the character and way of life.

Did you also have such a mentor during your studies or professional journey as you are for students?

I studied under deep socialism and photography had an implicit dimension of protest, defiance or critical thinking about the space of freedom of image and independent interpretation. I used these despite the regime, and this connected me with several teachers at the Prague FAMU. I remember that I even played football with my favorite teacher, Pavel Štech, and after the Gentle Revolution we had a joint author's exhibition in Dortmund.

What was the path to photography like?

The path to photography was determined by the secondary art school, where I graduated from the department of art photography. This fact guided me to continue my studies further on academic grounds. Prague's FAMU was the only one in Czechoslovakia and applicants from Slovakia had an admission quota of two or three students. It was such a firm decision that I was not discouraged even by two unsuccessful attempts, fortunately, the third time it worked.

How has working with young people shaped you as a teacher, but also as a person outside of school?

This is a difficult and complex question. Despite the robust generation gap, I am still both an optimist and a realist in this regard. The current pragmatism of students in relation to academic education is determined by the construction of an idea of ​​their future career, which to a large extent shapes the relationship to photography and teachers. Photography teaches us to look at reality with different eyes, teaches us a certain respect for the unknown, that despite our self-confidence, talent, planning, fulfillment of all professional skills, the result – a work of art – is uncertain, conditioned by circumstances that exceed us. This idea does not always coincide with the speed of life and the value principles of popular culture. In this, photography is unique and rich in mutual sharing and passing on experience. This information channel is two-way. I myself am sometimes pleasantly surprised by how students think and how they are able to communicate existential matters of life through images.

You have guided several generations of students not only in this personal aspect, but also in the photographic aspect. How are these generations different in the photographic aspect?

I feel that previous generations of students were able to free themselves more from excessive pragmatism. In the case of photography, they were able to take more risks, be bolder, explore more, experiment more, enjoy more, have fun, while accepting the assigned topics as a challenge to be personal and make their thinking accessible through images. For the current generation, speed and skill in mastering digital techniques and the possibilities of generating images as a prefab on social networks are significant.

They are uncertain and fragile when it comes to the possibilities of the conceptual creative process and analytical thinking to penetrate more deeply, seeking help on the aforementioned social networks. Of course, we must take into account the contexts of natural technological development and, in recent times, the availability of AI technology. Nevertheless, we see a return to the analog process in the case of the medium of photography among the young generation. Philosophically speaking – to the analog world, which represents a certain resentment, something mentally distant, but also a solid point of reference, representing something clear, principled, constant.

You also organize regular exhibitions with students and colleagues at the Ľudovít Hlaváč Gallery on Skladová. Are students afraid of exhibiting or the opposite?

Perhaps students have a certain fear of the unknown, which is brought about by the process of creation, selection of works, installation and preparation of the opening, but it is all about experience and enjoyment. When students see their framed works, they are delighted. The presentation inspires respect 

audience and the ability to professionally talk about the concept and intention of your exhibited photographs. I think that every exhibition is about fear before the opening and relaxation after the opening in a circle of discussing students. Finally, I also experience some stress during exhibitions, so it is important to exhibit and get to know yourself.

Your teaching is also based on the so-called mentoring, that you give students feedback on their work. How does the current generation, known for having a hard time taking criticism, accept it? Has it changed compared to the generations before them?

This is an important question that, unfortunately, comes from our pedagogical experience. We are researching and have researched the differences in acceptance and non-acceptance of possible criticism in each of the current generations Y, Z or Alpha. I see the problem more in generalizing and generalizing these problems. Photography, like philosophy, aesthetics and the like, are self-reflexive disciplines that greatly blur the human coexistence with art. Therefore, I perceive the problem of accepting or not accepting criticism as legitimate and natural.

The essential thing in this context is to have time for yourself. By this I point out the specifics of teaching photography, which necessarily needs more time and an individual approach based on the realistically smaller number of students in photography courses. Creative photography is currently about a way of thinking that is not acquired overnight, and I always take any rejection of criticism as a temporary state of the given student, which can change dynamically. The worst are students who only want credits.

You also go to workshops with students, especially in eastern Slovakia, where you also meet marginalized communities. How do students react to this fieldwork?

The motivation to implement creative workshops in Roma settlements was the long-standing tradition of social photography in the history of Slovak (Czech) photography. Names like Josef Koudelka, Markéta Luskáčová, Tibor Huszár and younger ones – like Andrej Bán, Šimon Kliman and many others – responded to the rural-archaic and extremely photogenic world of Roma communities. To convey this touch with a specific environment seemed very important and necessary for a young person. The very environment of Roma settlements and the way of communicating with Roma is a demanding task for a photographer.

I was very lucky with the students of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Czech Republic, especially the friendships of priests-parish priests in these villages, who, symbolically speaking, opened the doors to the bedrooms and living rooms of Roma families for us. For several students, it was the first contact and a natural social shock, they even feared for their lives. Our female students in particular became the favorite objects of friendship for Roma boys and children. In Lomnička and Podhorany, there were literally bunches of children who accompanied us throughout the village. The project in the monastery in Podolínec, which housed an orphanage and a special elementary school, was unforgettable. We spent a lot of time there not only taking photos, but also dancing and playing with abandoned children. In hindsight, I think that the final outputs, exhibitions or books with provocatively beautiful photographs of the bizarre world of the Roma were not the most important thing.

If students choose FMK UCM also because of photography, what should they not miss as beginner photographers who want to pursue photography?

In this context, I do not want to mentor and talk about the usual clichés such as love for photography, passion, desire, humility, diligence or professionalism in photography. I like the opinion of the French philosopher Roland Barthes, who speaks of the "madness" of photography. If a student at FMK decides to study photography, he must decide to be "mad" and not immediately ask what he can expect and expect from photography. I think that a decision is essential when it saturates all other supporting things.

I remember several of my students, current colleagues, who have not stopped taking photos, are successful, are engaged in artistic or product photography, exhibit and are, for example, invited as judges in competitions or as lecturers in photography workshops. J. Derrida speaks in connection with life and things about a visible line, which, however, has its inner counterpart of a “hidden” line, in the case of photography, it is a decision. The decision to educate must not be missing.

Is it important for you to feel a connection with people or the environment in documentary work? How do you build it? Can it even be learned?

Both processes are important, both communication and observation of the environment. Of course, it depends on what kind of interpretation is involved in photography. With each press of the camera shutter, we evaluate the depicted reality, which as the author – the subject – I appropriate, change, either into an album picture in a memorial or a subjective artistic image. In so-called street photography, a hidden camera, improvisation, sometimes creative aggression are important, which will make the situation interesting. In a social document in an institution, communication, eye contact, empathy, humanity, conversation, etc. are important. It is perhaps important to say that the current document is subject to the current aesthetic style, which moves in a pluralistic mode of several approaches and uses everything: humanity, provocation, truthfulness, falsification, subtlety, cruelty, kitsch, brutality, etc.

Postmodern aesthetics have no rules, only the individual character of aesthetics, ideas and concepts. I personally like a contact live document with eye contact highlighting the bizarreness of the environment and events. My professor at the Prague FAMU, Ján Šmok, claimed that photography is, among other things, a muscular activity, by which he explicitly expressed that we must not lose the instinct of observation, the sense of improvisation and reflexes, we must always take photographs and maintain the so-called professional competencies, which are unconditional. In that case, you can learn a lot.

When does the moment come that you put down the camera in the context of documentary photography and go to focus on the objects?

I put down the camera very often, and it is not just because of an overfilled SD card. This happens mainly when documenting in difficult environments, such as Roma settlements or social institutions. It is not always necessary to invade the intimacy of the subject with the camera at all costs. Many high-quality shots were created only after long interviews, when the subject himself requested a portrait, an interior shot or a series of shots.

I remember one situation in Podhorany, when Romani women and children were cleaning carpets on a bridge over a river. After a few shots, I put down the camera and asked for a rice broom and tried to sweep. If it were not for a random shot from a student who captured me, I would not have believed the response everyone had to my cleaning the carpet on the bridge. This is how short, intense friendships are created that open doors. Live photography requires the utmost attention, consideration and commitment, when the camera can sound like a synonym for aggression. Susan Sontag even writes about the photographer's perverse violence towards the photographed, and it is up to the author himself how he recalculates the ethical and moral norms that high art so easily and happily transgresses.

We also find a conceptual photo in your work. Is it important for you that the viewer understands exactly what you intended, or do you leave room for your own interpretation?

It is a current topic that is related to the scientific disciplines of aesthetics, interpretation and philosophy of art. Scientists talk about an informed aesthetic opinion, which can be personal, i.e. subjective, or institutional, guaranteed by the art community. Of course, for art itself it is important that the viewer understands the author's intention and message to some extent. Nevertheless, in recent decades I have observed the phenomenon of so-called commented tours at exhibitions, which indicates an increasing and enduring incomprehensibility of exhibition projects, when the author has to explain his intention. This is perhaps a natural development of the complexity and intertwining of new artistic initiatives with technologies. Many theorists claim that art must be refined, and therefore incomprehensible. The term elite – high – art, which is accessible only to a narrow professional community, is popularly used. To be honest, any art can be viewed emotionally through emotion, and that is crucial. We should not even resist those negative emotions that force you to go back to the beginning and think anew.

Back during socialism, I photographed social welfare institutions, but also military conscriptions and other things. I would be interested in how it was different to photographing a document compared to today.

I was at an age and time when I experienced military conscription firsthand. The first order after being drafted was that I had to come document the conscriptions and make an agitation board. Paradoxically, during socialism, images of conscription appeared in a “capitalist” magazine – the Swiss Camera. It was similar with clients of social welfare institutions, which the communist regime hid as something unproductive and ideologically inappropriate. These were issues of the relationship of the political elite and the majority society towards physically and mentally disadvantaged groups, which were stigmatized in the totalitarian regime and many were denied the right to a full-fledged socially beneficial life. By this I mean that under socialism there were topics that could not be officially documented, and if something was managed to be mapped through personal contacts, it was an illegal, anti-state activity. For the state, it was a dangerous pattern of behavior, an unacceptable escape into the world of freedom without political control.

If I were to compare it with the present, the ideological-political position disappeared and with it a certain kind of adrenaline. The space for protecting human identity and dignity is increasingly and more strictly protected, which complicates (in a different sense than under socialism) freely documenting public or personal life. However, with the onset of democratization of processes in society, new possibilities have been created. When I observe young people – student photographers, I see that they are absolutely prepared and adapted to these conditions.

How do you perceive the development of photography as a medium from the position of someone who has experienced analog, digital and now AI?

Naturally, I am an old veteran of analog photography. Photography has been a strong and open medium from its beginnings, and the periods of analog, digital and AI are natural stages of development. It was nice to experience the period of mechanical cameras, the smell of chemistry in the darkroom, we even experimented with glass plates (negatives) for a large-format camera at university. The analog process is the roots of photography. It is a philosophy, a life principle that has its own unmistakable value.

I wish everyone who plans to pursue photography to simply go through analog and experience it. It is a process that is being massively recycled in shock waves and is still being cultivated at prestigious universities as a traditional visual language. I think that all technologies, including historical ones, will cooperate with each other for a long time to come, and every technological advance improves the position of photography as a stable medium dealing with the continuity of the image.

In many professions, there is a fear that people will be replaced by artificial intelligence. What will happen to photography?

I do not specialize in artificial intelligence, or rather, image generation through AI.

As part of photography festivals (Venice, Arles, Month of Photography in Bratislava), I had the opportunity to see image products using AI. I think that the community of photographers is in a state of fascination and this is reflected in the enormous number of supporters, especially in the community of experimenters or authors who profess intermedial overlaps. However, I do not dare to assess to what extent AI will be a relevant creative process within the medium of photography and how art history will deal with the pressure on the requirements and credibility of the AI ​​image.

There are many ambiguities precisely in the legal issues of the emergence of authorship and protection. In the cultivated plurality, it will certainly become one of the full-fledged significant creative means of photography. It can be said that art using AI is suited to the latest art history considerations on contemporary art, which, according to theorist Nathália Heinichová, have an important attribute of a work of art – the norm of inauthenticity and the principle of transgression – blind individual power.

Do you ever just go out to take pictures, go out into the city and take pictures, or is it all just planned?

I like the phrase “just take pictures”, I really want to do that. However, I notice that I am quite comfortable. Of course, I plan all the time, because without plans we would not even have our digital footprint in the archive. I take pictures with my phone all the time, it is impossible not to take pictures if you are bound by friendships on Instagram and Facebook. But there is little serious photography that is tied to research. In the past five years, I have been unreasonably freed from serious photography by several book projects such as a historical study on the Association of Amateur Photographers YMCA and KSTL in Bratislava (400 pages), the picture book Béla Petrik, priest, photographer, chronicler (290 pages), a book on Photomontage and the currently in-progress project Tied to the Cross about the pilgrimage of the physically disabled from Warsaw to Częstochowa. Fortunately, there are creative workshops where I take my camera and take photos.

What are you currently working on photographically?

Currently, with my colleagues Evka K. Jonisová, Kristína S. Mayerová and Peter Lančarič, I am finalizing the KEGA project on violence, which will include interviews and photographs of selected authors who have documented various forms of violence, including the conflict in Ukraine. These include people like Andrej Bán, Juraj Mravec and Jana Rajcová. I am also trying to finalize a project on Roma settlements with the aim of organizing an exhibition next year. In October, I will attend an international workshop in northern Slovakia, organized by Lucia Benická from the Spiš Artists Gallery, where students from Poland and the Czech Republic will also participate.