Evzen Sobek
| Born on the 4th June 1967 in Brno, Czech Republic. Graduated from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Technology in Brno and the Institute of Creative Photography of the Silesian University in Opava. He works as a freelance photographer and as a photography teacher at the Institute of Creative Photoghraphy, Silesian University, Opava (Czech Republic) and at the Fotoškola Brno. He also works as a curator of Galerie Artistů, Brno. The focal point of his work is documentary photography. Beside the projects based on the clearly defined themes from concrete settings in his recent works he likes to have some mystery and ambiguity in his photographs, and tends to raise various questions rather than provide clear answers. But although his highly polished compositions lead one to suspect they´ve been staged, they are in fact originally perceived and originally captured fragment of unmanipulated reality. | |
| Awards | |
| 1999 | Czech Press Photo - general winner, awarded for the Gypsies in Brno City portfolio |
| 2000 | M.I.L.K. competition, U.S.A. - general winner in Love category, awarded for the photograph of a gay couple from the Gypsies in Brno City project |
| 2000 | MiO Photo Award, Japan - Grand Prix winner in the competition for young photographers up to the age of 35, awarded for the Ecce Homo portfolio |
| 2001 | Talentinum, Czech Republic - 2nd prize in documentary photography category, awarded for the Ecce Homo portfolio |
| 2004 | Choice - Credit Suisse Masterclass for Photojournalists from Central and Eastern Europe, U.S.A., Hungary - grant supported by ICP, New York and Robert Pledge |
Zeliv Monastery
Natural Born Gypsy
Gypsies in the City of Brno
Series where Sobek made his first photographs with strikingly unusual compositions that contrast people and milieus, with motifs in various spatial planes or several events occurring in parallel, in which he has sought levels of meaning deeper than those on the surface.
Sweet Taste of Freedom - Czech Villages of 1990s
People of the Hlucin Region
Initially, Sobek's chief interest was socially oriented documentary photography of a humanist orientation - taking documentary photographs of clearly defined topics, that is, photographs about the lives of a specific group of people, in which the depiction of some typical way of life is permeated with a generalizing view of fundamental life values.
Ecce Homo
Is moved even further away from clearly defined topics in clearly defined milieus towards a freer conception of subjective documentary photography. In the set Ecce Homo it is no longer important whether the photographs were taken in the Czech Republic, Portugal, France, Israel, or Jordan, or whether they show Czechs, Portuguese, Frenchmen, Jews, or Arabs.
Leaving
Home Sweet Home 03 - 05
Mixture of political and economic changes passed through in 1990' s in the Czech Republic.