The name of the exhibition suggests, that Zdeněk Halámek pits tradition of black&white photography vision against colour technology, today digital photography.The question is if the contraposition of those two visual areas is in his way so contradictory?Zdeněk Halámek is photographer of Karlovy Vary region with a huge professional register.His B&W and colour publications about spa-town with documentary and art photography have become the most popular. The have been published till today.He has introduced himself as a perceptive photographer of city landscapes, mainly Karlovy Vary historicist architecture and parks, which circle it, in very reliable, romantic or moody presentation.But yet from the 60s until the end of the 20th century he had devoted to the land and its natural character in symbiosis or conflict with contemporary civilization and technological developmentHe has found inspiration in environs of Karlovy Vary, how he many times demonstrated in photographic collections with an accent of technical influence and human intervention to the natural landscape from 70s.Halámek´s nowadays landscapes made in international workshops at Loket and Boží Dar have become oftentimes presented.So did the cycles České dvorky, which have changed into original creative message about our contemporaneouseness.  90s has enriches existing European travelling experiences of Zdeněk Halámek of extraordinary experience, literally globetrotting. Author has discovered USA, South America and Scandinavia.Rich impressions has used in a number of solo exhibitions dealing with exotic nature and life of its inhabitantsFrom sovereign professionalism were born his staged female nudes.In 2007 Zdeněk Halámek exhibited in Letohrádek Ostrov abstracted digital pictures of imaginary scenes, full of inventive colour and structural connections.It was mainly pictures of real walls, nooks or backyards, surfaces of streets and on the first sight ineffective motives. But the photographic sense and ability to see unusual phenomena in everyday life, allowing Zdeněk Halámek tune the colour images in a computer program to match his inner visions and incited the current imaginative associations.Even then, the photographs meaningfully dominated triad shape, structure and light, all in colour connections.Similarity with abstracting painting was obvious.And the change in the creative pursuit at the threshold of maturity as well.Using colour digital photographs Zdeněk Halámek entered into some kind of remarkable dimensions, in a very concentrated single sphere of interest in new, distinct creative tasks which surprisingly yielded a deeper understanding of what happened at the beginning of his photographic life.Zdeněk Halámek explains: „It´s my imaginary return into 60s, when I started to take a photos without knowing anything about how to do it. It´s a return to great feelings of freedom, hippies culture, music of Beatles, abstract art of František Kupka, who I´ve met for the first time. It´s retrospective move to breakthrough ways dominating to art and photography in 60s, to surrealistic and informal purpose and also to recollecting the work of important people of Czech photography like Emila Medková or Čestmír Krátký.”This „personal memorial resuscitation”of golden sixties has to be mention of his honest photographic work for coming forty years.Similarly as in photographic colour creations he has evoked residues of 60s art, he has retrieved great art of Josef Sudek in B&W contacts.He has exposed very longly and with difficulties each record using camera older than hundred years, which has been changing in his studio into contact B&W 9*12cm - 18*24cm photographs.These photos were results of his wandering around Czech town - Telč, Jihlava, Havlíčkův Brod, Loket and so on, better around their peripheries, railway stations. Author haven´t been taking documentary photographs of town, station buildings or trains.It has been a detail or fragment of reality which has meant more for him, so he mentions: „What film holds up as an imprint of reality, I put back to paper. “Nevertheless Zdeněk Halámek has „photographically seen”many fascinating and unique moments.First of all there were layers and deposition, structure, chinks, cracks, bursts, (wooden boards, old walls with bricks), lines, curves(sticking needles, metal fixtures or construction) - that all as a rich, continuing mark of time passing by - marks of past adherent to these days.This time the author has transformed their original and banal material substance by the Chiaroscuro dissertation in the suggestive photographic composition.Although Zdeněk Halámek stand opposed colour digital images, sometimes large-size to small black and white contacts, in both positions, his current work is to show the unity of its evocative photographic evidence and revealing the deep bias of the shooting.

Božena Vachudová