It’s a bit of a paradox. Photographer Josef Vrázel describes himself as a shy person and an introvert. Nevertheless, he visits strangers at their homes, talks with them and captures the stories of their lives through his lens. Basically, he only takes photos in a few villages in the Vsetínská Bečva valley. “I couldn’t even do it anywhere else, I just know it enough here and I feel at home here,” he says. His pictures can now be seen in Prague’s Leica Gallery.
Photographer Josef Vrazel (*1966) knows every corner of Wallachia. He has lived there since childhood, he was born in Karolinka. Most of his photographs come from this town and several surrounding villages, located next to each other in the Vsetínská Bečva valley. These are mainly Nový Hrozenkov, Velké Karlovice, Huslenky and Halenkov. Vrážel’s pictures authentically capture life there, connected to nature much more than people in cities know.
“I set such a limit for myself and said to myself that I will not photograph anything outside Wallachia,” says Vrázel. There’s a reason for that. “He knows and loves his homeland intimately, which can be seen in his deeply human photographs, which are not just ordinary documents, but perfectly composed images full of events, experiences and smells of the region where he is firmly anchored and from where, as he says, he will never leave ,” says the curator of the exhibition in Leica Gallery Jaroslav Kučera.
Documentary photography attracts Josef Vrázel because it gives him the opportunity to get to know many interesting people and their stories. “I like to talk, meeting them enriches me,” he says. Like many other excellent Czech documentary photographers, he does not make a living from photography, he works with numerically controlled machine tools.
“I was thinking about professional photography, and I was even ready to make that change, but covid came, stopped everything, and I took it as a sign that it’s probably not my path,” says Vrázel.
More than 70 photographs by Josef Vrázel can be seen at the exhibition in Prague’s Leica Gallery. Most of them are from recent years.
The story of a neighbor whose house burned down
One of the pictures, for example, depicts a man who is looking at the fire in his own house. “He lived in the neighborhood. He lived alone in a house, he collected things and garbage there. Sometimes I went to talk to him. He didn’t wash himself, he talked to himself and pooped. Sometimes he sat in front of the house and shot rats with an air rifle. He had a shack full of rags, which he dug out of the garbage cans,” describes Vrázel.
Karolinka, Kobylská, 2022 | Photo: Josef Vrázel, Leica Gallery Prague
Once a geeky neighbor was cold and couldn’t heat the stove. To make it easier, he poured gasoline into them. “There was a layer of rags up to his knees in the room, it blew and he barely had time to run out. He stood barefoot in front of the house, watching the firemen put out the fire and laughing the whole time. Then suddenly he stopped, froze – it was the moment when apparently realized the reality,” says Josef Vrázel. And that very moment is captured on his picture.
About a little girl in a village cottage
One of the photos shows a little girl on the potty in a village cottage. Around her are several goats. Previously, no one would have stopped to think about such a picture. “Today, one wonders if it is even appropriate to photograph it. When I took that picture, I was happy with it. I had fun with the mother of the little girl – they are happy that I am photographing them – and at first she said that I would put it on the Internet he didn’t have to give,” says Vrázel. However, after some time, according to his words, the mother’s attitude changed and she agreed to the use of the photo.
Karolinka, Stanovnica, Švanica, 2021 | Photo: Josef Vrázel, Leica Gallery Prague
The village is a natural environment, says the photographer
From Josef Vrázel’s point of view, the village is a healthy and natural environment. And while people from the cities perceive, for example, traditional slaughter as an almost barbaric custom, he feels quite differently. “I don’t see anything wrong with it. I know how my grandfather and grandmother took care of cattle. They raised it with love to eat it. And today we suddenly pretend that it’s wrong,” he wonders. There was a debate about this in the gallery in front of his photographs, which eventually resulted in the conclusion that the problem is rather that he consumes too much meat and that we kill animals industrially.
As a boy, he rephotographed Kiss posters
“No one took photos at home, I learned it in the school photo club. We had a great math teacher at the time and he was the one who led the club,” recalls Vrázel. It was still deep under the former regime, with all its now-forgotten attendant phenomena.
One of them, the photographer Josef, casually recalled: “As children, among other things, we rephotographed Kissák posters in the school photo booth, enlarged them to A4 format, and then sold them to our classmates for ten crowns. That’s how we traded,” he laughs.
Nový Hrozenkov, Vranča, 2018. | Photo: Josef Vrázel, Leica Gallery Prague
He was initially enchanted by the mountains in which he grew up, and began as a landscape photographer. After the war, he stopped photography and devoted himself to other interests. “I came back to it much later and have been taking pictures intensively for the last fifteen years or so,” he says. First he returned to the landscape, but he felt as if he was just repeating what he had photographed before. “It’s like I’m robbing myself,” he describes the feeling he had. “Then I started photographing people and I found that it’s a subject in which I always discover something new and which I probably will never run out of.”
I probably wouldn’t be able to take pictures anywhere else, he says
“I probably wouldn’t be able to take good photos in any foreign country. For me, communication with people is important. It’s best to take photos at home,” says Vrázel.
“In Wallachia and elsewhere in Moravia and Silesia, there were and are many great photographers – for example, Jindřich Štreit, Gustav Aulehla, Ostrava’s Viktor Kolář or Jaroslav Pulicar. Nevertheless, I believe that Jožka (as his friends call him) is the most genuine. With patience and he can conjure up a beautiful photo among his compatriots in any situation. It seems that it was given to him from above, he can make full use of it,” states the curator (and at the same time a top Czech documentary photographer) Jaroslav Kučera.
Josef Vrazel
was born on August 25, 1966 in Karolinka, where he still lives. He graduated in 1985 from the Secondary School of Mechanical Engineering in Vsetín. He started taking photography in elementary school. After his military service, other interests and hobbies began to prevail for him and he returned to photography again around 2005. he now works mainly on long-term projects that allow him continuity and a deeper insight into the subject. His main inspiration is the region where he was born and lives: Horní Vsacko and its inhabitants. You can follow his work here: www.josefvrazel.cz
“I don’t want to take photos secretly so that people don’t know about me. I have a different strategy, maybe more complicated, but for me it’s clean and clear. I have to establish such contact with the people I want to photograph that they stop seeing me as a photographer, that they consider me a part of of that moment, of that event. So I talk to them, we talk, we have to get on the same page. Only then can I make really authentic pictures. Often it’s just talking. Sometimes I feel like that’s what the most beautiful photography,” says Vrázel.
About the exhibition: Josef Vrázel: Wallachia, my home. Leica Gallery Praha, curated by Jaroslav Kučera. The exhibition will last until March 3.
