Dunescape Ilusions

I have learned much from the artworks of Josef Sudek and I was lucky to have lived for many years just a few steps from the place where he had lived and worked.   I was walking with my analogue camera along the same alleys and old gardens of fourteenth-century Prague. Surrounded by the atmosphere of tranquillity, stillness and intimacy one could focus on a little raindrop as if it were a whole world.  In the near absence of strong stimuli for the senses, it felt like shooting ones deep-laid feelings, and I waited impatiently in my dark room to see whether a piece of that early morning misty melancholy would be there...   Shooting digital colour photography of deserts and sand dunes has brought me to a different world and a different state of mind. The calmness of deserts is magnanimous and dignified, the clear morning sunlight is skimming the elegant crests of dunes creating a rich palette of shadows, the soft sand surface and rounded shapes of dunes are reflecting and absorbing different wavelengths of the early light with gentleness and grace.   During the post-processing work, the combinations of inter-weaved shapes and shadows and streams of light offer possibilities to express any idea, any mood, and any level of energy in a special harmonious way, the harmony being originated in the creative forces of nature. These offerings ultimately transcend the reality of the desert.   As the recognisable world dissolves in abstraction, the image comes to work on one’s mind like a fragrance or a piece of music, eluding rational understanding and revealing itself fully only as a feeling.