Jirka Stach

Last year Prague, the city where he was born, proclaimed Jirka Stach(b. 1944) its Photographer of the Year, an honor for a photographer who for more than thirty years now has been working in relative isolation on an idiosyncratic oeuvre. Stach’s photographs, abundantly garnished with drawings, sketches and marginalia written in a secret code, occupy a middle ground between surrealistic fantasy and scientific research. He does not use computers or other digital tools in their production. Like a craftsman, he prefers to construct the instruments himself that he needs to indulge his unbridled fantasy and appetite for experimentation.