Prague Photo Fair opens in Czech capital

Monday night will see the opening of Prague Photo Fair. Until the end of the week, the Mánes Exhibition Hall will present a wide range of photographers, galleries and art schools from Central Europe. For the first time this year, the Prague Photo Fair is part of a larger event – the Prague Photo Festival - that will be held simultaneously at twelve venues in Prague. Tomáš Hájek is the event coordinator:

Prague Photo Fair in 2009, photo: www.praguefoto.cz

“The Prague Photo was established as a follow-up of the already well established art fair called Art Prague which takes place traditionally in May in Mánes as well. With Prague Photo the organizers wanted to add one more event of a similar type that takes place in foreign countries as well so that Prague can host both Art Prague focused on contemporary art and Prague Photo focused on contemporary photos.”

Is there any central theme to your event?

“The nice thing about art fairs is that these events present various types of artworks because the main participants of both art fairs are the galleries and each gallery has a different characteristics and each gallery presents a different artist. So there is no central topic but it is a representative display of contemporary art.”

So what will be on display this year in Mánes?

“This year Prague Photo takes place on both floors. On the first floor there are about twenty galleries that present various works by well-known authors as well as newcomers and on the second floor there is a representative presentation of art schools that deal with photography.”

As far as I know there is also a Prague Photo Exhibition taking place in Prague at the same time. Do the two have something in common?

“Oh yes, Prague Photo is the first event of Prague Photo Festival. Prague Photo shows the exhibitions of various galleries and then various galleries in Prague will be showing their individual photography exhibitions. The idea of the Prague Photo Festival is to continue in showing contemporary photography during the whole month of April so that we could say April was a month of photography.”