KARTOON SERIES

Year: 2024
Medium & Technique: Studio photography with recycled cardboard constructions / No digital post-production
Artists: Michal Zahornacký & Aneta Hrenák
Exhibition: FOTOGRÁFICA BOGOTÁ, Centro Nacional de las Artes (CNA), Bogotá 2025

KARTOON, created by Michal Zahornacký and Aneta Hrenák, begins with a simple tension between the flat image and the three-dimensional body.

Cardboard forms are physically constructed in the studio and combined with the real human body so that they become a single form within the photograph. The boundary between body, object and image becomes uncertain. What has a clearly constructed spatial presence in front of the camera can appear, once translated into a flat photograph, like a drawing, collage or digitally assembled image.

Everything visible in the photographs, however, physically exists in front of the lens. The resulting figures are not constructed through digital compositing. This is important not as a claim of photographic purity, but because the illusion itself is produced by the camera’s transformation of a three-dimensional scene into a two-dimensional image.

The human body remains the starting point of the series, but it no longer functions as a conventional portrait. It becomes part of a construction in which physical space and graphic form overlap.

KARTOON therefore explores a simple photographic paradox: a real, physically existing situation can become an image that appears as though it could never have existed in reality.