Marcel Kolacek Research Post 3

Marcel Kolacek

Context
Czech freelance photographer born in 1983. He is very interested in reportage/documentary/street/portrait photography, he takes his images mainly in black and white, very rarely in colour. Kolacek uses short lenses because he believes closeness transmits emotion. Reality interests him which is why he created a shoot showing ordinary people's lives. He documents peoples hard lives but these also show a lot of joy, love and humanism. 

Photography

In this image we can see a man jumping across a dump wasteland, in the background we can see a cloud of smoke. This shows the type of life this man lives if he has to get to places by walking across a dump, it could suggest to us that he man work or live there. This area looks derelict as the only person we can see is him, this tells us that this area may not be very popular. It links to the fact that Kolacek photographs people's hard lives. This man lives a hard life because in a normal life people would stay away from these a kind of areas but this man is forced to travel through them. This photo has a depressing effect on us because we feel sorry for him as he has to live around the dirt and rubbish. I think the black and white effect adds to the tone of this image as it creates more of a depressing effect.

In this image we can see a woman walking with a bucket on her head. She may be carrying water back from a lake or carrying food to her family. This shows the lives of women in different countries as they have to slave away harder than your average woman because they have find and carry their own food. We can tell that she doesn't live in a rich area because she isn't walking on an actual path, the plants are all overgrown and starting to grow up the metal fence, there is also rubbish on the floor and poor graffiti on the metal fence. This links to Kolacek photographing people's hard lives because we immediately sympathise with this woman because of the jobs she has to do and the life she has to live.

In this image we can see a woman doing her laundry. She doesn't look unhappy which suggests to us that she may have experienced many things that doing laundry is the least of her worries. We can tell that she lives in a poorer country because of the shack that she lives in, it seems as though this may have been made by people in the area rather than real builders. Also, the fact that she is doing her laundry in a bucket also suggests to us that she is poor as regular people use washing machines. This links back to the fact that Kolacek photographs the hard lives of people because although it seems she is fine and happy this shouldn't be the way she should live. 

In this image we can see a man, who looks like he is training to be a boxer because of the wraps on his hands, doing push-ups against a tyre, he is doing this so fast that it has created a motion blur. The location suggests to us that he is in a poorer country because regular people who are training to be boxers will train in a gym rather than a shack that he is training in. Although we look at him to be poor and training to take his mind off his financial state, the fact that he is training shows that he has a dream and he isn't letting anything get in his way. This links back to the fact that Kolacek takes images of people that have hard lives. We sympathise with this man as he has a dream but it is hard for him to fulfil it because of the conditions he is living in.

Influence Summary

This photographer has influenced my work because he has given me the idea to photograph places where people live with hard lives. I liked the images he took of in their natural environments, for example the woman carrying the bucket on her head, she is an example of someone living a hard life.

I took Kolacek's idea of taking photos of people's hard lives to capture this image. Although this image has no focus on a person in it, it still represents modern hard lives. This picture is an example of modern hard life as we associate people who live on these types of estates to have hard lives. The graffiti on the metal fences can either show that people have no respect for this bridge or they wanted to express themselves by using graffiti. We can tell that this is a poorer area because of the metal fence and barbed wire along the top of the fence, you wouldn't see locations like this in richer areas. Kolacek influenced this image as he takes pictures of a poorer areas and countries which is similar to what I have done here.