When Frank Rehak and Jana Kopelentova got married in 1994, more than the traditional pledges of affection and loyalty bound them together. They also had a shared devotion to a specific mode of photography that, for them, nearly amounts to an ideology. They call it documentary photography.
It has other names: humanist or social photography. It is more than pretty pictures, which is not to say aesthetics don't matter. But in documentary photography, content rules.
It is political in a broader sense, in that it searches out and responds to people who bear most of the weight of society's imbalance. But it also seeks to capture images of people in their intimate moments, to reveal their humanity in its most transparent expression.
The Rehaks intend to bring this form of photography here in a formal way when they open the School of Photographic Studies in Baltimore sometime next year.
The model they have in mind is the Photo League of New York, created in the 1920s and brought to a sad end in the 1950s by the McCarthy-inspired anti-communist blacklist. "We want a place like that," says Frank Rehak. "Not just a school, but a place, an atmosphere, with a gallery, where photographers can come, be with others, have a home."
But the couple is not starting from scratch. They already run a similar school in Prague. They spend each summer there instructing a new batch of students, most of them Americans, teaching the routines and techniques that will enable them to document the motley life of the venerable Czech capital.
Students are sent out to photograph housing projects and orphanages and the children therein; they shoot the city's lavish palaces, the Gypsy people who wander its streets, its moody cafes. They record the textures of the day-to-day as written in the creases and lines of the faces of its people. What students do there, the Rehaks hope, they will do in Baltimore: explore and map the physiognomy of the city.
Documentary photography discourages disinterest. The idea is for the artist behind the camera to become a committed witness, determined to capture only the most truthful and essential images. A witness, by definition, tells what he or she sees.
This description of documentary photography may be imperfect, but you will know it when you see it. The images, when they succeed, are invariably distinctive. Many are suffused with a strange mixture of melancholy and furtive happiness.
