Černoch (Black Man) 1949

This is one of Emila Medková's photographs, we don't know when it was made, but it is a silver gelatin print on paper. This piece just goes to show that art can be made from anything, even dirt, or… well, some kind of textured grainy surface. The artist teases a face out of the textures and the shadows. It looks like a profile. What really gets me is the eye - it feels like a marble, or maybe some kind of ceramic? It makes the face almost cartoon-like. It also gives the whole piece a slightly unsettling edge. It makes me think of the surrealist photographs of Man Ray, but maybe with a touch more grit. There's an ambiguity to the work that I really appreciate. We can ask ourselves: Is this an act of making, or finding? Either way, I think it's an image that embraces the strange and the unexpected.