EG Can you tell us about your background?

TZI come from Czech Republic from a small town called Opava. Since I was a kid I always felt some urge to express myself through art but I was never really good in painting or other crafty things. When I was 16 I took a short course about photography and straight away I knew that photography was the perfect medium for me.

However, after completing high school I went to study for a Law degree. I started to study photography only three years ago when I moved to London to study for my BA in Photographic Arts at the University of Westminster. I finished my BA earlier this year and at the moment I’m doing my MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art.

EG Your series Supreme Vice reflects upon ‘our susceptibility to irrational beliefs that often stems from the desire to better understand the natural order of things’; where did your interest in this subject arise from?

TZI’ve been always fascinated by death and photography as a medium has a really peculiar relationship with it. I’ve been dealing with death in pretty much all of my work. In my previous body of work, Watch Your Skin Peel, I was quite interested in taxidermy because I think that it works in a very similar way as photography does – it is a very realistic representation of something that no longer exists.

When I started to work on the Supreme Vice series I was watching a lot of Kenneth Anger’s movies and reading Huysmans’s books; and along the fact that I had moved to London, hometown to two of the most profound 20th century English occultists, Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare, played an important role. Although I would probably fit the best under the label ‘atheist’, I am very much fascinated by the occult aspects of our existence, and death is definitely one of them. We can never fully grasp it and when we finally know it is already unsubstantial. I am not really interested in after-life or reincarnation but in death as a non-being; as a bi-product of life; and especially in its totality in so far as the cognitive functions are considered. Then only thing that remains is the material body that decomposes and slowly merges with the landscape – and this is what I tried to capture with my work.

EG Your work seems both considered and intuitive, both controlled and spontaneous; I would assume the editing process is very important in your work?

TZI work in many different ways and in Supreme Vice I relied a lot on my intuition. I think that Supreme Vice as a body of work works a little bit outside of the possibilities of language and I can’t fully explain how I arrived at the finished project. I have a formal education in art history and I am aware of all this while I’m working so you can find quite a lot references to other artworks, which sometimes reference yet other artworks in themselves (like Man Ray’s Dust Breeding), but mainly I tend to work very spontaneously.

As you guessed, the editing process is a very important part of my work. I am quite modest while taking photographs; I am definitely not one of those people who shoot hundreds of photographs and then search for three good ones. I learnt photography shooting on film and I never had quite enough money, so I always think twice before pressing the shutter release. But editing is important. You can say that the act of taking a photograph is already an editing process – you have to select what you want to keep and what to dispose of from the reality in front of you.

EG Can you tell us about the way in which you hang your work and the importance of this?

TZIt’s different with each project but so far I managed to quite successfully avoid the typical “line of pictures in frames” presentation of my work. I think that people often underestimate the presentation of their photographs and especially now, when photography can finally stand for itself as a medium equivalent to painting or sculpture, photographers should be encouraged to experiment more with the way in which they show their work. The line between artistic mediums is becoming extensively blurred and I think that people should take advantage of that.

I printed my images in different sizes; depending on what sort of role or function I assign them within the series. For example there are these very emblematic images that are very straightforward with strong symbolism within them so I print them large because they represent the overall idea behind the work and the spectator can relatively quickly realize what is going on. But then there are these other images that are perhaps not so clear at first glance and there is way more things going on in there so you have to come a bit closer and investigate them a bit longer, it is a way more intimate viewing experience. With Supreme Vice I also tried to incorporate some element that would go beyond the two-dimensional works so I brought ten boxes full of old bones and I spread them out in front of the wall. I wanted my work to be more tangible and this mass of physical bones combined the two major concerns of this body of work – death and landscape; or the occult in relation to nature if you like.

EG Could you tell us about the two images selected for Contact, ‘Lillith’ and ‘Cape’, and their significance within the series Supreme Vice?

TZThe first image, the landscape, was taken in Arizona in the Petrified Forest. It was taken during a bright day but the moon was very clear, hanging from the blue sky without a single cloud. I called it Lilith, referring to the theory about hypothetical second moon of Earth, the so called “dark moon” that keeps escaping our attention but supposedly exists. The name Lilith comes from an old Jewish legend about Adam’s first wife, Lilith, who left him and so he created Eve. Lilith is also thought to have been the lover of Lucifer, but he left her because she wanted to steal his power. In general she is a quite doomed character; I think that she is beautifully portrayed by Marianne Faithful in Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising.

The second photograph is of a figure in a cape. The cape’s role as a piece of wardrobe lays ultimately in concealing someone’s figure and face; it is very much a mysterious piece of clothing in any context, not only necessarily related to the occult rituals or initiations. I’ve seen quite a few vintage photographs that portray a person in a cape in a variety of environments, concealing the face entirely, leaving everything to the viewer’s imagination. One of the modern examples of such a photo is Mapplethorpe’s portrait of Lisa Lyon, but he gives viewer a clue on who might be inside because the sitter’s hands are revealed. I decided to recreate such an image in the simplest way possible, almost as it would be a scientific piece of evidence.