Martin Kollár
Martin Kollár (born 23 November 1971 in Žilina) is a Slovak photographer and cinematographer. Career. Kollár studied cinematography in the Film and Television faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. In 2003 he joined Agence VU, (which he appears to have left in late 2013). He worked on documentary and fiction films, including "Autoportrait" (director), "Ball" (producer) and as a cameraman for "Velvet Terrorists", "Cooking History", "Across the Border: Five Views from Neighbours", "66 Seasons", "Ladomirova Morytates and Legends", and the animated film "In the Box". His numerous photographs of everyday life in Slovakia are published  in newspapers and magazines worldwide, such as "Le Monde 2", "Libération", "GEO" and "Courrier International". "Slovakia 001", a survey of Slovakia in colour photographs, was prompted by a contest held by the Slovak Institute for Public Affairs. Kollár avoided looking for the exceptional and instead concentrated on oddities seen in everyday life. The photographs were exhibited and also published as a book. "Television Anchors" is a series showing television news reporters in incongruous situations. It was prompted by the sudden cancellation of an assignment to photograph New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina: although Canal Street had escaped most of the damage , it was the standard television backdrop thanks to its ease of access. Allowing more into the frame around the reporter than normally permitted by a television news broadcast presents a very different picture. In the series "Nothing Special", begun around 2000, Kollár explored the environment of countries that had been in the Warsaw bloc. He traveled nearly 13,500 km, "looking for moments that portrayed the chaotic and often humorous moments"; examining "clashing cultures, tradition versus modernity, and sometimes situations that are simply perplexing". The photographs were all unstaged. In order to participate in the project "This Place", launched by Frédéric  Brenner, Kollár was expected to spend six months photographing in Israel. He based himself in Tel Aviv, and visited many sites made available thanks to much preparation and persuasion by his assistant, Talia Rosin. He concentrated on Israel's future rather than its past or even present, and thus on sites of preparation or prevention. security- and surveillance-related sites and activities in Israel. The book has no captions, and the photographs go unexplained. "Every image in this Slovakian photographer's depiction of Israel is a photograph of unintelligible secrets," commented Alec Soth. "At the end of ["Field Trip"] I 'm more confused than I was at the beginning, making the book a wonderful example of photography's inability to be able to explain very much at all", wrote Mark Power. A "New York Times" review of an exhibition of "This Place" praised Kollar's "color pictures that hop from subject to subject but are on edge or surreal", saying that there was no need for captions as the images "engross and unsettle on their own". It was named one of LensCulture's favorite books of 2013. For the 15th in its series of "European Eyes on Japan: Japan Today , in which photographers cover Japan prefecture by prefecture, the EU–Japan Fest Japan Committee invited Kollár and Olivier Metzger to photograph Chiba. Kollár stayed in Japan for a month in spring 2013. The resulting work was exhibited in Arles as part of Marseille-Provence 2013 and published in book form. Sean O'Hagan writes that It is [a] state of impermanence that Martin Kollar sets out to explore in his latest book, "Provisional Arrangement", which attempts to map out a psychogeography of uncertainty and stasis. Brad Feuerhelm calls the book, with its "cinematically constructed images", "a work of soft genius". Martin