Photographer of the Year
Tereza Mundilová
Her photographs are like playlists on Spotify. First Olivia Rodrigo, then Snow Strippers, then Sega Bodega. These are also the artists she listens to, most likely in that order. Tereza Mundilová doesn’t mind the commercial pop nor the club underground. She uses both in her images, and both are equally worthy of respect for her. In a poptimist sense, she is honestly interested in how these two worlds interact with one another. What they share, what they steal from each other.
“I listen to music 24/7. I grew up with MTV, Tumblr and MySpace. These were the places where creative people from around the world met. We created sort of the first, great on-line archive of our feelings and our tastes,” describes Mundilová the first impulses which formed her aesthetic tastes. She was born in Vienna with Czech ancestry, and now lives between Paris and Berlin, and although the first artistic steps of her teenage years led to her playing with an emo band, it was visuality, photography and directing music videos which finally won out.
“A portrait is a manifestation of the moment of encounter between two people. It’s them and me. I show those aspects of them which I am able to understand and identify with,” she says about the photographs of celebrities, as well as her hard-to-sort solitaires made on commission: sometimes for the German weekly Die Zeit, sometimes for the 032c fashion magazine (published every six months). Much like with her musical tastes, Mundilová feels most at home in fragile, tectonically volatile terrain where pop culture clashes and melds with avant-garde tendencies.
Mundilová’s main influences come from music and from things which are seemingly unrepresentable in visual terms. But if there is one thing we can say about her photographs, it is that their volume is turned all the way up. It seems the people in her images will burst through at any moment. They attack the space before the image, as if the margins and frame couldn’t contain them. They expand like sound. For Mundilová, each photograph is an amp turned to the max.
Pavel Turek