To step into the former studio of Josef Sudek is to feel time lose its order. The space is hidden in a backyard in the center of Prague, yet it feels remote, almost detached from the city’s forward motion. The studio is small, domestic, and quietly persistent. It was once a place of work and of living; Sudek shared it with his sister. Today, it functions as a house for artists and their temporary projects. The continuity of this use does not erase the past, but sediments it. The walls hold the residue of years of looking. The windows admit light in a particular way. One is aware, standing there, that photography has always been bound to such ordinary conditions: a room, a window, the angle of morning sun.
Sudek’s flower photographs linger in the background of the space not as images to be quoted, but as ways of working: slow, attentive, bound to the repetition of returning to the same motif. In Date with a Plant, the artist Radek Brousil returns to the window and to the flower, as a continuation of this quiet persistence. The black surfinia, grown on the artist’s balcony, is photographed over twenty-five hours on a mirror placed on a kitchen table, near the window. Yes, twenty-five. The method is modest, domestic, almost provisional, and still, it challenges the notions through which we account the movements of the universe. What unfolds across the sequence is the slow modulation of light. Morning, afternoon, evening, night: the plant remains; light passes over it.
Roland Barthes once wrote that every photograph contains a kind of temporal wound, a gentle violence of time, of a this-has-been. The surfinia images are saturated with this quiet temporality. Each frame is a small confirmation that a moment has already slipped away. The additional, fictional hour—the twenty-fifth—feels like a hesitation. It is as if the day were asked to linger for a moment longer, not to become something else, but simply to not close when it is expected to close. The difference is minimal, almost tender.
The choice of camera registers as a further temporal transgression. The Yashica Samurai Z, produced in 1989, carries with it the sediment of a historical threshold. The year echoes in the work without being explicit: the end of one order, the beginning of another, the sense of standing inside a change whose meaning would only become legible later. In the studio, this historical echo is quiet. It sits alongside Sudek’s own biography—his bodily endurance, his persistence in using a large-format camera, his attention to small, recurring motifs. The exhibition does not stage a confrontation between past and present. It allows them to coexist in the same light.
In the back room, once Sudek’s darkroom, two photographs of a rotating Czechoslovak one-crown coin from 1968 introduce another temporal layer. The coin turns, arrested by strobe light, into fragments of movement. The year is present as material, not as narrative. The girl planting a linden sapling on the coin’s reverse returns the viewer, faintly, to the plant in the other room. Barthes speaks of the photograph as a certificate of presence; here, the coin becomes a small, circulating presence of another moment: one that did not complete itself; one that remains suspended between intention and aftermath. The rotation does not resolve in one direction. It circles.
Radek Brousil, Date with a Plant, 2026
Throughout the exhibition, the material qualities of photography remain visible. Images printed directly on glass refuse the softness of paper. They reflect the room back at the viewer. One sees the work and one’s own position in front of it at the same time. Looking becomes doubled. The viewer looks at the plant, at the coin, at the light, and then at themselves looking. This reflective surface feels appropriate in a studio that has become a site of return, a place where different photographic temporalities overlap. Sudek’s long attention, Brousil’s twenty-five-hour day, the viewer’s brief visit: each is a different scale of looking, briefly sharing the same space.
There is no spectacle here, no insistence on urgency. The exhibition unfolds like a quiet conversation between photography and time, between a living plant and the afterlife of a studio, between the city outside and the slow interiority of the room. If there is a gesture being made, it is small: to stay with what is already here, to let light move, to notice the moment when the day could have ended but did not—if only for the duration of a photograph.
The show is on view until March 22, 2026.
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- Cover:
Radek Brousil, Date with a Plant, 2026
