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About Czech photographer, Zdeněk TMEJ (1920-2004)
Zdeněk TMEJ, a prominent reportage and documentary photographer, graduated from the State Academy of Graphic Arts and worked for several years as an assistant to top Czech reporter Karel Hajek. He secured his place in the history of world photography with an original photograph of a complete mission in Wroclaw, Poland (then Wroclaw, Germany). He was deployed there between 1943 and 1944 as a postal translator. During his stay there, he created a collection of several dozen photographs showing the everyday life of the men deployed. There is no primal excitement in his pictures, no one is tortured or beaten, and yet they breathe sadness, small human suffering, not so much physical as mental suffering. He mostly photographed in natural light or with a single light bulb on film with a low sensitivity of 19 DIN. The photographs were published in book form in 1946 under the title 'Abeceda Dusevinho Prazdna' (Engl: Alphabet of Mental Emptiness) with an accompanying text by Alena Urbanová. He fled to Prague in 1944. During the May Revolution, he took several photographs, the most impressive of which shows a wounded German soldier on the sidewalk in Prague. Together with Karel LUDWIG and Václav CHOCHOLA, he undertook an adventurous photographic journey to defeated Germany shortly after the end of the war. From February 1948, he photographed performances by the State Singing and Dance Ensemble. In 1951, Zdenek TMEJ and Karel LUDWIG received an offer from the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Rudolf Slánský, to set up the Department of Photography and Public Relations of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. After Slánský was removed from office, his work came to an end. In 1958, he was imprisoned for seven years by the communist regime. After his return from prison, he devoted himself to advertising and documenting demolitions and reconstructions in Prague's Vysočany district. Zdenek TMEJ died in Prague in 2004.
Photo books by as well as with works by Zdenek TMEJ
- 'Abeceda Dusevniho Prazdna' (1946); ''Die Welt des Tanzes. Volkstanz und Ballett in der Tschechoslowakei' (1955); 'Totaleinsatz : Breslau 1942 - 44.' (1989); 'Totaleinsatz' (2001); 'Books on Books #10 - The Alphabet of Spiritual Emptiness by Zdenek Tmej' (2011); 'Photobloc. Central Europe in Photobooks' (2019);