Gardens of South Moravia

In my photographic work, I primarily focus on themes of wild and unspoiled nature and landscapes within a roughly 300-kilometer driving radius from my home. I do this mainly because, in my eyes, this landscape and nature are so rare and hard to find that they have the highest value for me as a photographic subject. My current mindset and the gradual attachment of the South Moravian landscape to my heart have led me to a state where I have taken a few pictures of purely cultural and man-cultivated landscapes. I find this so significant and interesting that I feel the need to elaborate on it a bit.

For seven years now, I have been fortunate to travel with my wife to Hodonínsko in South Moravia to visit her family. This year, we gained an additional travel companion, our daughter Sofie, along with us and our cat. I always heard from other photographers that once I had a family, I wouldn’t have time for photography. So far, I haven’t noticed this as much in my case. I am fortunate that my wife and extended family have a great understanding of my photography and accommodate it. Even before our new role as parents, we planned many of our trips around my photography. I have also significantly adapted my photography to the new situation. After 18 years of photographing, I perceive the ability to adapt to the surrounding conditions and my inner state as crucial. Therefore, I photograph more while traveling with a stroller, often from asphalt roads. I use versatile zoom lenses for this and have returned to a small Olympus OM-D-EM10 with a 12-200 lens, which allows me to photograph landscapes and animals and use a wide range of features and a stabilized sensor. I also purchased a full-frame Panasonic S5 with two wide-angle lenses. However, I use it less frequently, only when I manage to get up early in the morning and go out just for photography.

In recent years, I occasionally heard from my wife’s family about the so-called Moravian Tuscany. Whether I had heard of it and if I planned to photograph it. I respond emphatically that I do not plan to. I always think about what I want to convey with my photographs. What does the given landscape represent? The way South Moravia is photographed is, from my perspective, extremely monotonous and captures a landscape that is also monotonous. The human influence on it is, in my view, neutral to negative. Often, these are shots with a long lens of hills and fields, excluding the sky or significant optical focal points. I explain the popularity of this subject, even among top Czech landscape photographers, by the fact that photographers exploit the familiarity of the motif among the general viewing public (everyone knows the fields by the road) and thus more easily achieve success on their social networks. However, I imagine and perceive the South Moravian landscape differently than many of my colleagues. My grandmother came from Znojmo, my wife is from Hodonín. I have practically traveled all over South Moravia. What fascinates me most about the cultural landscape of South Moravia is the close connection between the landscape and the people who cultivate it. It can be a local small farmer, winemaker, or beekeeper. All of them have a huge, probably even beneficial, impact on this landscape. The landscape that is growing on me is precisely such. It is a landscape where I feel the tastes of wine and beer, the tastes of apricots, plums, and wild sloes during a walk. The tastes of walnuts, honey, and cheeses. These are places where you can pick dill or other herbs by the road and then use them in the kitchen. It may seem strange, but modern landscape photography and haute cuisine have a lot in common. What I do in photography builds on what our ancestors did for tens of thousands of years before me. They were hunters and gatherers. They gathered and hunted in nature what had value and significance for them and then processed it into products or dishes. I do something remotely similar. I bring home and to society shots, imprints of nature and light that have a certain aesthetic or informative value for me. This year, I collected wild garlic to put it in soup or with fish. My wife and I collected elderflowers for syrup, and now in the summer in South Moravia, we collected and ate apricots, sloes, and blackberries. And I also photographed all these plants.

In these new shots, you can see a landscape shaped and cultivated by people. They make fences, formwork, terrain modifications, plant plants, and subsequently take care of them. These are like giant gardens and garden colonies, where the owners pass the land from generation to generation and work on it from morning to night. In this landscape and in my photos, you can see wild field flowers by the roadside, grain, vineyards with rows of vines, scarecrows in the fields, orchards, and fields of sunflowers. The health and prosperity of this landscape are also evidenced by the large number of wildlife, insects, and birds. I observed colorful bee-eaters, buzzards, and kestrels, many hares, and partridges here. It is a landscape to which I have gradually formed a relationship over seven years. I visited it, tasted it, worked a bit in it, and observed and got to know it a lot. This landscape also provided a very pleasant refuge for our stroller walks. Therefore, it could not be left unphotographed. I also changed the time of photographing. It is no longer early sunrise or sunset. I photographed during the afternoon, using the way sharp light and cloud shadows move across the landscape.

It is possible that I will not abandon this subject and will continue to pursue it. Similarly, I occasionally focus on the Lower Vítkovice area or Krakow. For now, I will post photos from these places here on the blog and see if they earn a place in my portfolio in my eyes. At the moment, I am really excited about the photos and look forward to running around these gardens of Moravia or rather the gardens of Eden barefoot, just in shorts, and with a camera in hand, photographing again.

A landscape with field flowers, grain, vineyards, orchards, a garden house with a scarecrow, trees, and groves, fields of sunflowers, and the Pálava hills in the background. Such a diverse landscape could not go unphotographed.

A play of shadows over the vineyards in the South Moravian landscape. Photographed not far from the previous shot. The landscape is suddenly similar but different again.

Gardens of Eden. An apricot tree in the hills among the vineyards.

A pair of bee-eaters returning from a hunt to their nest.