Catalog number: FPL08KP

Philatelic Commemorative Sheet - Karol Plicka

Philatelic Commemorative Sheet Slovakia 2008 - Karol Plicka - Joint Issue with the Czech Republic.

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Philatelic Commemorative Sheet Slovakia 2008 - Karol Plicka - joint issue with the Czech Republic.
Author: prof. akad. mal. Dušan Kállay
Issue number: 030 PaL 427/08
Date of issue: 12.09.2008

Specification
Karol Plicka was a key cultural figure in Slovak cultural history of the first half of the 20th century, the founder of Slovak cinematography and the first creator of photography in Slovakia, whose works were based on a clearly formulated authorial concept. He was born in 1894 in Vienna to Czech parents. He became a professional musician (later, in 1927 – 1931, he studied music folklore and ethnography at the Faculty of Philosophy of Comenius University in Bratislava) and after the establishment of independent Czechoslovakia, he collected and recorded notations and texts of folk songs in the service of Matica slovenská in Martin (1924 – 1939). Aware of the complex connection of expressions of folk culture, from the beginning he captured the environment in which the songs originated through drawing and increasingly through photography. Thus, the first sets of photographs were created, recording people, landscapes, folk architecture, elements of the living environment, tools, work activities, and ceremonial customs. A selection of these photographs resulted in artistic postcards, which Matica slovenská published as early as 1924 – 1926. Plicka realized that the spiritual and aesthetic values of traditional folk culture would soon disappear, and therefore he recorded them with incomparable effort and thoroughness – not only textually and photographically, but as soon as the available technology allowed, also in gramophone recordings and on film strips. The synthesis of these efforts was the first Slovak sound film Zem spieva (1932 – 1933), a modern film poem that was to be "a praise of life in the Slovak countryside from spring to winter." Initially, however, Plicka's experiences of Slovak, seemingly primeval piety and poverty, were reflected in a stark, harsh documentary style. In the 1930s, however, his work was dominated by photographs that were somewhat akin to the monumental images of Martin Benka, but also contained distinct poetic features. Plicka compiled them into the picture book Slovensko (1937), the first and very popular Slovak photographic publication, which was later published in numerous re-editions. In subsequent years, Plicka processed and published several other photographic projects and also worked as a teacher at the newly established FAMU in Prague. He died in 1987 in Prague. Aurel Hrabušický

source: pofis.sk