Jaroslav Rössler (25 May 1902 Smilov - 5 January 1990 Prague) was a Czech photographer and member Ninesil.
Jaroslav Rössler trained in a portrait studio at the company Drtikol et al. (1917-1920) and worked there as a laboratory technician for eight years until his departure to Paris. At the age of twenty-one, he noticed him Karel Teigewho commissioned him to do phototypesetting work for Magazines Band, Drive, Construction and ReD. This gave him a new idea of the possibilities of functional use of photography. He progressed from photos k photogram, photomontage, typographic collage and drawing, until finally he mixed all the processes in a suitable way, as the contemporary conception of modern art demanded.
At the beginning of the year 1925 went to Paris for a six-month study stay and in the same year became a photographer of the Liberated Theatre. Most of the shots of stage productions of that time are his work. Before his second departure for Paris in 1927, he started working as an advertising and industrial photographer with the picture magazine A colourful weekwho then supplied his reports from France.
In Paris, where he planned to stay with his wife Gertrude Fischer (1894-1976) permanently, he was involved in advertising, mainly in experimental studies Luciena Lorella, and has created work for such major companies as Michelin or Shell. However, he was also attracted by the lively street life, and this interest eventually proved fatal and marked his entire future. He encountered demonstrators and, while photographing the impressive scene and its actors, was arrested, spent one night in prison, went insane, and only after six months of intensive searching did his wife find him in an insane asylum in Strasbourg.
He and his wife opened up Žižkov photographic studio.
It was not until the 1950s that he returned to photographic experimentation again. He created the so-called Prism - photographs taken through a double prism, he also experimented with malleable processes - besides solarization it was mainly Sabatier effect - he went back to pigments. He exuberated a new imagination of colour and shape.
Jaroslav Rössler is an inseparable part of Czech modernism. A modernism that was as much literary, painterly and photographic as it was typographic, architectural, theatrical or cinematographic. His work is a sensitive echo of the times, but it expresses itself independently of the expression of others. Apart from Rössler, Czechoslovak photography does not have an artist whose work in various means of expression so perfectly connects to the modern conception of art. The unique creative legacy of the author of the earliest Czech photograms and the inventor of photograms are abstract visions developed over more than half a century of artistic career.
Jaroslav Rössler belongs together with František Drtikol, Josef Sudek a Jaromír Funk is one of the world-famous Czech photographers whose works are sought after at prestigious auctions.
His photographs are also part of the collection Photographer, which was presented at the beginning of 2009 in Prague.
gnews.cz - Jan Vojtěch
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