INTERVIEW: MICHAEL STEINER BOREK
BY ALICE MARXOVÁ, 9/2024 (in Czech)
”It was a series of photographs for an exhibition at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC. I was trying to imagine the feelings they might have had when they were leaving their place for the very last time. They went to the train station. Perhaps they might have hoped that they would return. I photographed what remained from that era: the lantern they might have seen from their window, the train station, the window in their flat, the staircase. A photographic/text essay about departing.”
LOCAL ARTISTS PORTRAY THE GENERATIONAL PAIN OF THE HOLOCAUST
BY MARK JENKINS, 3/2024
“Borek’s photos depict everyday scenes in the hometown of his father, who survived Auschwitz as a youth. The pictures have an aching emptiness that evokes the many Jews who were deported and did not return.
DOCUMENTARY MOVIE: MICHAEL STEINER BOREK
BY CHARILAOS KARADŽOS AND PAVEL ČAPEK, 11/2022 (in Czech)
”Michael Borek straddles three cultures: Jewish, Czech, and American.”
BY LOUIS JACOBSON, 9/2018
“Over the past decade, he has regularly returned to its eclectic mix of post-communist wasteland and stubborn, primeval overgrowth. Eventually, Borek began seeing posters advertising a large, mixed used development. Initially, the idealized affluence they offered seemed incongruous, but as the posters disintegrated, the construction churned ahead and the project is now near completion.”
BY ALENA ROKOSOVÁ, 9/2018 (in Czech)
“I am trying not to do industrial porn, says photographer Michael Borek. This interpreter for American presidents exhibits in a Prague synagogue…. His photography is inspired by surrealism and the poetics of Josef Sudek.”
BY DANIEL ANÝŽ, 9/2018 (in Czech)
“There is an irresistible story behind the exhibition of Michael Borek’s photographs at the synagogue in Prague’s LIbeň neighborhood. How often does one have the opportunity to see photographs that are also owned by the former First Lady, former Secretary of State, and Democratic party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton?”
REDLINE PUTS THE FOCUS ON BETWEEN THE MEDIUM: SEEING PHOTOGRAPHICALLY
BY MICHAEL PAGLIA, 4/2017
“While just about everything is worth seeing, there are definite standouts. Michael Borek’s photos of photo-wrapped buses depicting patriotic landmarks are incredible. The shots of the White House, for instance, look like they could have been taken on site — but you’ll do a double take when you notice covered-over door.”
FOR PHOTOGRAPHY, A NEW WAY FORWARD AT REDLINE ART CENTER EXHIBIT
BY RAY MARK RINALDI, 3/2017
“Michael Borek’s Treachery of Images series, for example, looks like he took photos of famous monuments in Washington, D.C., and layered bits of urban architecture on top using a computer. Turns out they are actually just photos of those monuments that have been reproduced on tour buses. He is a street photographer, not a programmer.”
WILL PHOTOGRAPHY SURVIVE ITS ART-HISTORICAL KARMA?
BY WILL MEIER, 3/2017
“Michael Borek’s really wonderful series in which various immediately identifiable landmarks suddenly ‘freeze‘ flat as you notice they’re just photos of photos of the landmarks, applied as vinyl to the sides of buses or some other sort of metal industrially-paneled surfaces. These defining contrasty fissures in the images’ surfaces carve their own space up like a Mondrian, referencing the perpendicular edges of the picture plane.
THE QUESTION IS NOT WHAT YOU LOOK AT, BUT WHAT YOU SEE
BY GEOFFREY C KOSLOV, 7/2016"
“Very few of Borek’s images show people. In this image, it is Borek himself, in performance, on site at the factory. While he waited for the appropriate light to enter the factory, very much what Sudek did in his images in St. Vitus’ Cathedral, the emptiness of the factory appears to have taken a Kafkaesque hold on Borek. Borek did comment that he appreciates in Kafka’s writing, yet another former Prague resident, the author’s sense of alienation, absurdity and dark humor.”
TREACHERY OF IMAGES/THE WHITE HOUSE
BY MARK JENKINS, 4/2016
“There are 16 pictures of the president’s home in ‘Treachery of Images: The White House,’ Michael Borek’s show at Multiple Exposures Gallery. Yet it could be said that there is only one. Each picture of the landmarks is identical; what differs is the backdrop on which it has been — what? Projected? Reflected? Superimposed?… It’s easy to confuse representation with reality. That’s why this one picture is worth 16 looks.”
BY MICHAEL STEINER BOREK, 9/2015
“At first glance, the opening photo of the series seems to be only a picture of something on a wall that reminds the viewer of an eye with rust running down like tears. But upon closer examination, one realizes that the eye happens to be a CCTV camera, and it is the observer who is actually being watched on the street while looking at the eye.’”
BY REGINA F. GRAHAM, 8/2015
“Borek was much more interested in the abandoned factory than the Clinton connection…. Borek neved had the chance to meet the former senator until he accompanied her (as an interpreter) on her last trip to Europe as secretary of state. He told her aides that he had photographed the factory where her grandfather had spent his entire life working. Clinton asked to see the photos and later sent him a thoughtful thank you note.’”
AN ABANDONED FACTORY’S CLINTON CONNECTION
BY JAMES ESTRIN 7/2015
“Borek has spent years searching for and photographing ‘old and dilapidated things,’ like abandoned industrial sites. Not long ago, he went to an enormous lace factory in Scranton, Pa., that was eerily frozen in time from the day it closed in 2002. Walking through the complex, which included an infirmary and a bowling alley, he could feel the presence of the generations of unsung workers who toiled there throughout the 20th century.’”
BY JAMES ESTRIN 7/2015
“Coincidentally, Mr. Borek accmpanied Mrs. Clinton on her last trip to Europe as secretary of state, and she asked to see his photo. ‘It was just a simple twist of fate,’ he said. ‘King of weird, but kind of natural.’”
MICHAEL BOREK’S UNNERVING PHOTOS AT THE CZECH EMBASSY
BY LOUIS JACOBSON 7/2014
“There is nothing as absurd, or creepy, as Kafka’s famous insect character in the photography exhibit at the Czech Embassy by Michael Borek, which commemorates the 90th anniversary of Kafka’s deaths. Still, many of the works exude an uneasy vibe... Borek’s most appealing work comes when he locates what Paul Simon calls ‘angels in the architecture’—a bit of whimsy in the otherwise sterile context.”
MICHAEL BOREK AT MULTIPLE EXPOSURES GALLERY
BY LOUIS JACOBSON, 7/2013
“As a teenager in Prague, Michael Borek recalls seeing a ’one-armed man in a shabby coat schlepping a tripod and a large-view camera’… Now, decades later, Borek is mounting an exhibition of works that pay homage to Sudek and his oeuvre. The connections are not precise—Sudek worked in black and white, while Borek’s images are in color—but both artists share an affection for low-key, somewhat abstracted tableaux.”
INTERPRETER OF PRESIDENTS, PHOTOGRAPHER OF TRANSIENCE
BY DANIEL ANÝŽ, 4/2013 (in Czech)
“I saw him for the second time at the Czech Embassy in Washington, where he had an exhibition of his photographs. Strange ones, American in their subject matter and Czech in their sensibilities, poetry, irony gentle rather than evil, where what’s in the frame also hints at what’s happening outside the frame.
PHOTOGRAPHER MICHAEL BOREK CONSTRUCTS THE WHOLE FROM DETAILS
BY JAN ŠÍDA, 4/2013 (in Czech)
“At times, one must turn into a detail-oriented detective to discover the meaning of the photographs. A mystery hides in common subjects such as an armchair, a lamp shade, or bowling pins. Borek’s photographs bring to mind modern theories of things and phenomena appearing in the abstract space.”
JUXTAPOSITIONS: THE VOICE BEHIND THE CAMERA
BY JANET SCHARP, 1/2013
“While working on his Scranton project, Michael visited the factory three times, spending eight day there over eight months, taking 1,400 photographs-a process that he calls ‘sketching with the camera.’... Rather than documenting the entire factory, Michael selected scenes that juxtaposed the former grandeur of the building with the decay and vandalism underway there.”
OVERLOOKABLE WORKS SHOULDN’T BE MISSED
BY MICHAEL O’SULLIVAN, 5/2012
“Borek’s photos of stilted machines show us what’s there: the beauty of decay. But they also bear silent witness to something that can’t be seen—or described—so easily.”
BY BRIDGET COAKER, 4/2012
“Instead of simply photographing the rooms, peeling paint, broken windows, all familiar references in such a project, [and indeed Michael has these in the set], he had begun to use the textual qualities of this decay and the half light of unlit buildings to make an aesthetic that moves it beyond the merely representational.”
THE BEST PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITS OF 2011
BY LOUIS JACOBSON, 12/2011
“All factory operations stopped, some looms were left with unfinished lace still in them, and some of the dismissed workers left behind personal belongings. In the years since, the empty factory has been frozen in time; Borek captured it in elegaic fashion, from reams of archaic punch cards to dirt-smeared windows.”
“THE SHOW IS OVER”: PHOTOGRAPHER MICHAEL BOREK CAPTURES AN ABANDONED LACE FACTORY
BY LOUIS JACOBSON, 10/2011
“Some of the resulting juxtapositions embodied Andre Breton’s definition of surrealism as ‘the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.’ I became fascinated by this place where time literally stood still, and one could walk through the layers of history.”
PHOTOGRAPHER CAPTURES PATHOS OF ABANDONED SCRANTON LACE WORKS IN NORTH SCRANTON
BY JOSH MCULIFFE, 10/2011
“People in the art world are taking notice of the Scranton Lace photos, several of which have been selected for juried shows by curators from the Corcoran, Whitney, Hirshhorn and Getty museums. And the ‘Beautify’ photo rececently placed second in the fine art category at the FotoWeek DC photography festival.”
CIAO, DIGITAL, HELLO, UNPREDICTABLE ART
BY JESSE HAMLIN, 4/2010
“There’s a surreal, painterly quality to many photographs, particularly the work of Czech artist Michael Borek, whose images are being showcased this year… His mysteriously beautiful ‘Homage to Kamil Lhotak’ brings Magritte to mind. A hot air balloon carrying two figures hangs in a twilight blue sky, a strange glow of light emanating from the blurry town in the distance.”
FANTASTIC PLASTIC CAMERAS AT RAYKO EXHIBIT
BY KRIS VAGNER, 10/2011
“When Borek moved to the United States… he had no trouble finding vast tracts of similarly lifeless design in America’s suburbs and strip malls. He notices sumptuous colors in barren places, and, looking through the Holga’s romance-inducing lens, captures the visual poetry buried within something as plain as an old curtain.” Borek’s quiet, self-assured images are helped along by his trust in an unpredictable plastic lens.”
DAY FOR DAY FOR … NIGHT: MICHAEL BOREK’S PHOTOGRAPHS HANG IN AN ETERNAL TWILIGHT
BY CHRIS COMBS, 12/2008
“It might be hard to get to Borek’s brooding, mysterious photographs, particularly in the sunny Czech Embassy —this show is best visited on a cloudy day—but his worldview grows on you.”
CZECH LENS: DIFFERENT YET SIMILAR EXHIBITS CAPTURE PRAGUE’S PAST, PRESENT
BY STEPHANIE M. KANOWITZ, 12/2008
“Subtlety and nostalgia define MIchael Borek’s photographs in the ‘Wide Asleep’ exhibit at the Czech Embassy… The 23 images in ‘Wide Asleep’ were taken in both Czech Republic and the United States, focusing largely on aging architectural structures while also paying homage to the surrealist artists Borek admires.”
