Literature and Photography: Media’s Quest to Decipher the Mystery of the Everyday

This article examines the intersection of literature and photography, focusing on their ability to capture everyday life. It explores the evolution of photography in 1930s and 1940s Czech culture, a period marked by aesthetic debates about its legitimacy as art. By analysing the works of Miroslav Hák and Jiří Kolář, the article highlights a paradigm shift from traditional "great art" to an appreciation of the mundane. The fascination with the banal, which was transformed into art through various, most often surrealist, methods, had already manifested itself in Czech culture. Still, it was not until the establishment of Art Group 42 that the every day and the mundane were used to express existentialist reflections. Hák and Kolář introduced into Czech culture a new type of sensibility for reality in that they did not hide reality or dull its edges through lyricism. For them, it was more important to recognise just what kind of world we live in. Thus, the stimulus for their poetic creations was not necessarily artistic in nature, but ontological: Who are we, where do we live, and how are we supposed to grasp and understand these facts?