Biography
František Drtikol - výstavka from Krajská knihovna Františka Bartoše ve Zlíně YouTube channel (subtitles in english)
František Drtikol was born on 3 March 1883 in Příbram, in Bohemia, the youngest of three children in a merchant family. After completing a grammar school, he learned the craft in the studio of Antonín Mattas in his hometown. From 1901 to 1903 he studied at the Institute for Teaching and Research in Photography in Munich, an experience that left him with a lasting sensitivity to the late Art Nouveau style, visible in his earliest images.
In 1912 he opened his own studio in Prague, in partnership with Augustin Škarda, at the corner of Vodičkova and Jungmannova streets. The place soon became a centre of the city’s artistic and social life. Before his lens passed many of the leading figures of the First Czechoslovak Republic and of European culture: T. G. Masaryk, Edvard Beneš, Leoš Janáček, Alfons Mucha, Emma Destinnová, Alois Jirásek, Josef Suk, Bohuslav Martinů and Rabindranath Tagore. He became the most celebrated Czech photographer of his generation, and in 1925 he won the Grand Prix at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Art in Paris, which gave him a solid international reputation.
Alongside his success, Drtikol cultivated a deep interest in spiritual teachings throughout his life. He practised yoga rooted in Tibetan Buddhism, both Mahayana and Vajrayana, and from the late 1920s this path moved to the centre of his existence. In 1935 he sold his studio and left photography almost entirely, turning to painting, meditation and spiritual practice. He settled in a rented villa in the Prague district of Spořilov, where he lived in seclusion and became known as the “Buddha of Spořilov”. Around him gathered a circle of disciples, whose lineage continues today.
He also worked as a translator and was among the first to render key Buddhist texts into English, including the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Yoga of the Great Symbol, The Middle Doctrine of Nagarjuna and the Diamond Sutra. His own teaching was direct, practical and highly personal, combining strict doctrine with the dissolution of illusion and full presence in the moment.
Drtikol died in Prague on 13 January 1961. In his will he asked his followers to let his physical form be forgotten as quickly as possible, and to keep alive only the teaching they had received from him.
Photographic Approach and Techniques
Culture fotografiche: František Drtikol e la poetica dello straniamento from Centro Sperimentale di Fotografia Adams YouTube channel. (audio Italian, subtitles English)
Drtikol’s work can be read as a journey in three stages, each with its own language.
The Pictorialist phase. In his early period he worked with the noble printing processes: bromoil, gum printing, platinotype and oil printing. These techniques allowed him to treat the photograph as a handmade object. He intervened directly on negatives and positives with retouching and painterly alterations, building soft, lyrical images shaped by the Art Nouveau taste he absorbed in Munich.
The modernist phase. Around 1921 his approach changed radically. He abandoned the softness of Pictorialism in favour of direct studio lighting, sharp contrasts and strongly constructed geometry. His sets filled with props such as circles, waves, prisms and ropes, and the human body became one element of a composition, often locked in an interplay of light and shadow. The influence of Cubism, Futurism and Art Deco shaped this period, which produced his most celebrated nudes: The Wave (1925 to 1927), The Dark Wave (1926), Nude with Ring (1927 to 1928), Salomé (1923), Step and Supplication (1926), and Mother Earth (1931). In these works the figure and the geometric structure merge, and the dynamics of the pose carry symbolic weight. His mastery of light is the thread that holds this whole phase together.
Photopurism. From the late 1920s until about 1935, Drtikol moved toward pure abstraction. He built compositions with figures made of wood and paper, and mostly stopped using live models. The scenes became rigorous arrangements of form, light and shadow, close to a visual meditation.
The spiritual dimension. The Buddhist path emerges in his images indirectly. It can be read in the attention to the transience of bodies and forms, in the sense of existence as something fleeting, and in light treated as a metaphor for knowledge and enlightenment. In the Photopurism period, the figures can be seen as a symbolic expression of themes such as emptiness (śūnyatā) and the changeable nature of consciousness. The sequence from the studio portraitist to the abstract constructor, and then to the man who gave up the camera, makes his body of work coherent as a research into form, impermanence and what remains when the image is gone.
Personal Considerations
František Drtikol dokument from muotak YouTube Channel (english subtitles)
With František Drtikol we are looking at a photographer who worked through some of the most turbulent decades of European art. While in France Dadaism and then Surrealism were rewriting the rules, he remained in Prague for nearly all of his life. This gives us a chance to widen our view of the history of photography and to meet an artist who was also a spiritual researcher: a man who moved from Pictorialism and the Art Nouveau taste of his youth, through the geometry of Art Deco and modernism, to the abstraction of Photopurism, and finally gave up the medium altogether.
The female nude appears early in the various branches of his practice. According to the video documentary on his art (here above), he began by painting religious themes, above all the crucifixion, seen from different perspectives and distances within the frame, and soon the female nude entered those scenes. Once he became a professional photographer with a studio, he kept exploring religious subjects. Salomé is a good example. The severed head of her victim can look gruesome to anyone without an art historical background, yet the theme is an old way of exploring the power of female beauty to capture the attention, thoughts and feelings of men.
In his paintings of the 1920s and 1930s we also see nudes set inside natural landscapes, which is exactly where I stand in my own work today. When he moved from Pictorialist images to directly lit bodies, his interest shifted from the attraction of matter to movement: ballerinas and bodies in motion within the frame, emblems of a research that ran in parallel with his study and translation of far Eastern religious texts. In the end he replaced living models with figures of wood and paper, which can be read as the sign of an extreme effort directed toward a higher state of spiritual enlightenment.
He is still considered one of the most important and influential Czech photographers, and a small personal memory shows how that influence can travel. Years ago, in the era before the pandemic of 2020, I attended a model sharing event hosted by a professional photographer, together with another photographer. The host and I spent the evening describing to each other our alternative techniques and gear, with the pleasure of meeting a creative colleague in person. Then the other attendee joined in and declared that his signature style was lighting the model’s body with a direct strobe so that only the edges of the body were illuminated.
At the time I was not convinced. Now I smile at it, because that solution had been in use in a Prague studio about a century earlier. Drtikol worked with sharp contrasts and bodies shaped by strong lights and deep shadows cast on them, thus accentuating their outline in the 1920s. I do not say that the other photographer copied him. It is much more likely that he arrived there on his own and never heard the name Drtikol. This is how a visual language travels: it reappears in distant places and times, in the hands of people who do not know who first used it.
Here the will of Drtikol gives the story its echo. In his last words he asked his followers to forget his physical form as quickly as possible and to keep alive only what he had taught. In a strange way his images obeyed him. The man may be forgotten by many, while his light continues to shape the work of photographers who have never read his name.
My invitation is the usual one: study more, observe more, allow yourself to be strange to the normies, and keep searching for your own voice. Humanity needs it.
Shine on!