PHOTO: FRED KRAMER

Exhibition curator: Jan Mlčoch
Exhibition design: Lenka Míková
Graphic design: Zuzana Lednická

The first retrospective exhibition of Fred Kramer (1913–1994), the most accomplished Czech advertising photographer of the 1950s–1980s, draws from the extensive collection of his works that his wife donated after his death to the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague. In the thirties, Kramer graduated from the State School of Graphic Arts where he studied under Professor Karel Novák, in whose studio Josef Sudek had been enrolled a decade earlier. At the time, Kramer also engaged in social documentary photography and after World War II, during which he was interned in concentration camps, he returned to photography. He excelled above all in studio photography, combining the legacy of avant-garde art and a knowledge of the commercial strategies of those days. In the 1950s and thereafter he collaborated with foreign trade companies (Skloexport, Centrotex, Kovo, and others) and with the domestic House of Fashion shop. From 1967 to the early nineties he was a freelance teacher at the FAMU Film and Television Academy in Prague where he taught many future professional photographers. The focus of the exhibition is his photographic output dating from the 1960s when he was one of the very few who also made colour photographs and collaborated with prominent graphic artists. He became best known for his Madonna of Košíře, an earlier advertising photograph that was chosen in the 1980s as their logo by the young publishers of the underground cultural magazine Revolver Revue. The retrospective exhibition intends to substantially increase the public‘s awareness of the photographer’s oeuvre.