Ľubo Stacho: Prayer / Sacral Elementum VI.

A Confession (or Looking Back)

“It was my younger brother Pavol who first introduced me to photography, and together we started a photography club in the Cultural Centre in Nováky. We received our initiation into the mysteries of the medium from Lajči Bugár, who would visit us from Partizánske on his Pionier motorbike. This was the heyday of the analogue approach, when film was developed in darkness in tanks and photos materialised in trays under the dim light of a darkroom lamp. At this time my brother and I prepared a photo lab in our basement where we would spend not only all the hours of the day but also entire nights. And then came my studies in photography at the Faculty of Civil Engineering in Bratislava and at the B-Klub photography club. Every year we organised a show in which we exhibited recent work and invited guests such as Vladimír Vorobjov, Ľudovít Hlaváč, Zuzana Mináčová and Oľga Bleyová. In 1976, we collaborated with Tibor Škandík on an exhibition of fifty 1 x 1 metre photographs of the architecture of Bratislava. The show opened at the Faculty of Architecture in Sofia (BG).

I was accepted to the Department of Photography at FAMU in Prague in 1979 after completing my basic military service at the Military Art Studio. FAMU was one of the most liberal schools during the period of normalization in Czechoslovakia. After this, I worked on architectural photography with the Association of Slovak Architects in Bratislava. Our studio was based in a cellar on the street now known as Mariánská. It was there that I first started my documentation of light and my Obchodná Street project. Then it was the Municipal Cultural Centre, where I prepared the dramaturgy for the Profile Chamber Gallery and devoted myself to the development of amateur photography. In 1990 I joined the Academy of Fine Arts and Design and established the formal study of photography in Slovakia.

I am not the kind of artist who expresses feelings, who seeks out beauty in abstractions. I am more interested in content, ideas, in analysing society. I have always worked on individual projects in which I look for messages for both the present and the future. I hold up a mirror to society in the hope that I can bring about change.” (Ľ. Stacho, 2023)

About the artists

Ľubo Stacho studied at the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the Slovak Technical University (SVŠT) in Bratislava (1976) and at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague (1985). In 1990 he established the study of photography at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava and led the Photography Laboratory there until 2003. He was appointed professor in 2010. The scale of his work is remarkably wide, ranging from documentary photography to creative projects, performance, installation, intermedia intersections and email art projects.

Stacho has received many awards: the Gold Petzval Medal (1974), First Prize in the UNESCO World Heritage Fund in Prague (1993), a prize at the Photography Biennial of the Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo (1995), Personality of Slovak Photography (2021) and many more. His work has been the subject of dozens of solo exhibitions and has featured in more than 300 group exhibitions, including Mattress Factory Pittsburgh, 1995 (USA), Foto Fest Houston, 1996 (USA), Vienna Photogallery, 1997 (AUS), and shows in Ljubljana, 1998 (SI) and Tel Aviv, 2000 (IL). He has been a visiting professor at the universities of Ghent (BE), Amsterdam (NL), Budapest (HUN), Nottingham (GB), Providence (FR), New Jersey (USA), Jerusalem (IL) and Lahti (FI). His solo exhibitions have been held in Pittsburgh (USA), Vienna (AUS), Tel Aviv (IL), Tokyo (JP), Berlin (DE), Warsaw (PL), Kaunas (LT) and other cities and countries. Stacho’s photography also features in numerous international collections. Since 2008 he has collaborated with his wife Monika Stacho on many projects. He lives and works in Bratislava. https://lubostacho.webnode.sk/