Karma takes a strange turn in a reunion of sorts
[Originally published on Medium in summer of 2024. I wanted to get it archived here on my own site, with a few minor updates.]
Something remarkable happened to me not long ago but you need the backstory, I’ll make it short.
In 1998, I attended a documentary photo workshop in Prague as part of my effort to pivot away from newspaper photojournalism, which I had been doing professionally for a few years. I was trying to start over and rebuild on a foundation of personal vision.
Vojta Dukat
During the workshop we had a guest speaker, a Czech photographer named Vojta Dukat.
We were told he was great but little-known, an idiosyncratic, elusive character. We were lucky, he just happened to be in Prague at the time from his home in The Hague, Netherlands, where he had emigrated after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague. [Note: I’ll save you the time, he doesn’t have a website or much online.]
He came into the classroom, all massive beard and rumpled overcoat, and said to us ‘ok, I will show you my photos’.
He pulled a stack of small work prints from a plastic bag in his coat pocket and spread them haphazardly across the table for us to look at. The printing paper was nothing fancy.
I was floored. Each image was quietly evocative, loaded with old-world mystery, timelessness, and atmosphere. As good as any work I’d ever seen.
This was the direction I craved for my own work. So later that same day I urgently sought him out to get feedback, hoping he’d both affirm my talent and impart to me some secret-sauce wisdom to elevate my game. After all, I was already a ‘professional’ photographer, at a workshop alongside amateurs.
Maybe you can see where this is going.
On that sunny day I found him in a darkened basement pub just steps away from Charles Bridge. After patiently looking through my portfolio, he matter-of-factly dismissed my work — and dismantled my ego — in a matter of minutes.
“I’m sorry, but these photos don’t do anything for me.”
Floored again. I know what you’re thinking. As many friends suggested later, I could ignore his opinion, ‘screw that guy telling you about your art’.
But I had asked, even chased him down - and in that instant I understood completely that he was right. My pictures were a somewhat disjointed hodgepodge of photojournalism outtakes. Something I might offer a photo editor to show how I could handle a range of assignments. It wasn’t that they were bad (they weren’t) but that it simply wasn’t the cohesive, poetic vision I was seeking.
I was in anguish. It wouldn’t be until a bit later that I would recognize the gift he had given me.
I resolved that instead of breaking me it would drive me to play the long game, I would be relentless in setting the bar higher and digging deeper. For the next ten years or so that’s what I did.
Not to be more him but to be more me. I actually started the next day, photographing Prague’s tourist carnival that I would normally flee from.
It was a start. Over time I did get not just better and more stylistically coherent photos - what I now call authorship - but a deeper understanding of how your sensibility needs to infuse your work. This is something I learned not just from Vojta but from Viktor Kolar, another amazing Czech photographer I met at the Prague workshop. Viktor to me is maybe the epitome of quiet poetry in photography, and finding that poetry in your own environment (in his case, his industrial hometown of Ostrava).
When I started in photography Josef Koudelka was one of my first inspirations, maybe the best-known Czech photographer. He’s a master of intense, surrealist poetry culled from life. So I owe a lot to the Czechs, and I like them, which is I guess why I talk about them a lot.
Personal vision became the cornerstone of photography and my teaching. You get better when you become more you. The world doesn’t need more cookie-cutter images.
And it started in part with one guy’s simple but brutal honesty, that thankfully I chose to embrace rather than reject. I have had many who inspired me, but he was perhaps the most pivotal.
Um, cool story Bill but why are you telling it now, so many years later?
Because in the summer of 2024 I ran into Vojta by chance in a Dutch train station.
Yep. While visiting in-laws in The Hague, my daughter and I were scrambling through the main train station on our way somewhere, searching frantically for our platform. As we came down a long escalator, out of the corner of my eye I saw a bearded older guy with a walker way down below in the crowd. He was headed for the elevator, three more seconds and he would have been out of sight and gone.
There was no question in my mind. I called his name.
We had just been in Prague and I had talked about Vojta with my old Czech photographer friend, who happens to be good friends with him. He had mentioned Vojta was doing well but had had some kind of bad injury recently. Now here he was, just days later. Crazy.
I wouldn’t say we had a profound conversation and he didn’t particularly remember me. The whole thing was over in a few minutes. I did manage to thank him, briefly recount our previous encounter (I think I stuck with something like ‘you looked at my pictures and it helped me a lot’), and talk about our mutual friend in Prague. I made sure my daughter took a few photos. As his bus pulled up and he hobbled off, he winked and shouted his email address.
I was floored once more (for old times’ sake). I couldn’t get my head around it. What did it mean? Something just came full-circle, what was karma trying to tell me? I have no idea. Maybe it was just a cool coincidence.
Curious about Czech photography? It’s a fascinating and unique creative legacy, with strong roots in surrealism, going back at least a century to the one-armed ‘poet of Prague’ Josef Sudek. Check out the great Fototorst book series, which includes Sudek and the only readily available book of Vojta’s work (my Prague workshop instructor, a well-known US photographer and educator, was equally struck by the work and offered to help him get published but Vojta replied ‘I don’t think you are the one to discover me’). Other photographers I recommend include Josef Koudelka, Karel Cudlin, Tomki Nemec, Bohdan Holomicek, and Viktor Kolar.