Ladislav Postupa Czech, 1929-2016

Postupa was one of the heirs to the tradition of Czech Surrealistic photography. His fanciful interpretations of ordinary settings draw on a penetrating surreal perception and a rich imagination. He also used technological innovation with some skill in photography and graphics design, especially as it applied to large-scale architectural installations of photographs.

Postupa started to photograph in his twenties, but for a long time it remained just a hobby for him. Around 1959 he began to concentrate on photography in a more serious way. Six years later he became an official member of the artists' organization.

During the 1960s his work came to be better known publicly, when his photographs were shown in important exhibitions on Surrealism and Photography in Brno in 1966.

In 1967, his monograph was published, and he started to work as a professional photographer, opening a photo studio in Liberec.. By the beginning of the 1970s he started to paid most of his attention to the applications of photography in architecture and furniture design, which brought him much more to the field of applied arts. His recent work is much closer to graphics than to photography.

Ladislav Postupa belongs to the generation of Czech photographers, who absorbed Surrealism and tried to duplicate and renovate it. As he admits, his work is close to Vilém Reichmann, the giant of post-surrealistic Czech photography. Postupa was also looking for uncertainty within the real world.