2007 Portfolio Prize Runner Up: Hynek Alt and Aleksandra Vajd
The history of photography is dotted with extended portraits that men make of their wives and lovers: Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, Harry Callahan and Eleanor, Emmet Gowin and Edith. It is not so common to find a joint portrait of a couple, created collaboratively by both man and woman. Hynek Alt and Aleksandra Vajd spontaneously began the project manwomanunfinished when they discovered they were to have a child. In their description of the origins of the project, they explain that the images were initially created out of basic curiosity and a spirit of playfulness, although it has clearly developed into something more intense and ongoing.
With this (doubled) body of work, the viewer finds him or herself in a curious and unusual position, caught between the gaze of the photographer (who is also the subject) and the subject (who is also the photographer). This creates an even greater hermetic seal between the viewer, the creator, and the person photographed than ordinarily, locking the gazes into a three-way stand-off, not only to contemplate the nature of the relationships, but somehow to be implicated in it as well. The match of image to image in each diptych is guided by gesture, emotional tone, as much as by palette. The images are compelling, crisply colored, frequently unsettling.
The artists portray the current incarnation of the work as an “intimate confession carried out in a series of portraits . . . a mutual examination of the person with whom one has decided to live, to bear responsibilities, to share everything.”
All photographs from the series manwomanunfinished. Courtesy the artists.
Hynek Alt was born in 1976 in Kutna Hora, Czech Republic. Aleksandra Vajd was born in 1971 in Maribor, Slovenia. Alt holds a BA and an MA in photography from FAMU in Prague; Vajd holds photography degrees from FAMU and a degree from the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine in Ljubljana, Slovenia. From 2004 to 2006, they both received a Fulbright Scholarship to study photography at SUNY, New Paltz, New York, where Alt finished his MFA. Their work has appeared in numerous exhibitions in Europe and the United States. Together they live and work in Berlin, Prague, and Ljubljana.
