Pavel Dias Photography

The opening of the exhibition is on Tuesday, September 21, 2021 at 6:00 p.m.

prof. Mgr. Pavel Dias, photographer and pedagogue

December 9, 1938 – April 19, 2021

Pavel Dias was one of the important Czech photographers of the second half of the 20th century. He worked on the border between journalistic and documentary photography, he was one of the photographers of the first domestic picture magazine Mladý svět. From 1964 to 1983 he was a photographer working with various magazines. He focused mainly on advertising photography. From 1983 to 1988 he worked at the Secondary School of Applied Arts in Brno as the head of the photography department. From 1989 to 2009 he was a professor at FAMU in Prague, and from 2005 to 2008 he also taught photography at Tomas Bata University in Zlín.

In his photographic work, he emphasized deeply humanistic photography. Thanks to his experience with reportage photography, he was able to clearly convey to the viewer a certain situation in the given context, he sought objectivity and his photographs do not have a stylized author’s handwriting, where form prevails over the content. Pavel Dias has long been involved in photographing thematically focused cycles. His family experience led him to a cycle dedicated to concentration camps called Torso of the Holocaust, photographing horses meant an escape into the original world of the inner relationship between man and animal and also in the unhappy period of normalization to use the opportunity to document human society through a specific atmosphere of racing.

We present a very brief cross-section of the work of a great Czech photographer. We are not talking about a retrospective, but about honour and memory – a gesture towards a great artist, a teacher, a good person who left us this year.