Vlastimil Kula

Vlastimil Kula, published by Taschen, is a monograph of the Czech photographer's staged black-and-white images of the body, made in explicit opposition to what he called the boredom of pornography.

The 280-page hardcover collects Kula's shadowy, theatrical compositions built around sex, taboo, love, passion, and rebellion. Figures emerge from darkness in tight interiors, often doubled by mirrors or obscured by props. The effect favors mystery over explicitness, closer to staged tableau than documentary nude photography. Taschen has published several monographs on photographers working at the edges of erotic imagery, and Kula's sits near Jan Saudek's in that list; both are Czech, and both built staged, theatrical nudes out of the same postwar photographic culture.

Kula was born in Czechoslovakia in 1950 and studied art photography at the Prague Academy of Arts. He traveled to England, Canada, and the United States before the Soviet invasion of 1968 forced his return, and he has lived and worked in his hometown of Cheb since. His photography carries the imprint of that history. Picturing sexuality and the body openly was, for him, a form of resistance to a state that policed both.