Juraj Bartoš

This exhibition and publication introduces the work of one of the most significant contemporary photographers-documentarists in Slovakia.

Juraj Bartoš took photographs at cultural events of various kinds over the course of several decades. He contributed to fashion magazines, but he especially documented what was not interesting for the media before 1989. He operated almost exclusively in exteriors, in the urban environment in particular and became one of the first true documentarists - because unlike reporters, he did not exclusively take photos of visually attractive situations. He systematically worked on collecting photographic testimonies from a selected environment and a regularly repeated event. At times, his documentations grew into a complex ethnological or cultural- anthropological photographic testimony on a given environment and time. He pays special attention to random texts and item clusters frequently revealing ironic contexts. But he is most interested in the anonymous people of the street - as human types and concrete individuals at the same time - he creates momentary and psychological portrait studies of people lost in the crowd.