Thomas Beachdel
Marie Tomanova’s New Vision: First Roll, Kate and Odie (2025)
It may seem a little abstract, or even reaching, but as soon as Marie Tomanova proposed in January, 2025 that she would like to create a new single piece of all photographs from the first 36-exposure roll of film she took of Kate and Odie in 2017, and title it First Roll, Kate and Odie (2025), the image that entered my head and would not leave was El Lissitzky’s The Constructor (Self-Portrait) (1924). The reason is that Tomanova’s First Roll is almost everything that El Lissitzky’s The Constructor is not. Whereas The Constructor apotheosizes the artist himself—his eye, the range of his work, his vision—First Roll, does the opposite. Through exhibiting all 36 photographic frames, Tomanova de-hierarchizes the role of the artist—her role—shifting the god-like eye, or vision, of El Lissitzky, to the viewer, who is free to find for themself the photograph with the most meaning to them, rather than having it dictated by an edit, or by the idea of the single “best” image selected by artist, editor, curator. In so doing, First Roll shifts the importance of the absolute vison of the artist (as worker, constructor) seen in The Constructor, to the importance of the vision of the viewer or at least considers and includes them as an essential part of the process, as a collaboration between artist and viewer.
In Tomanova’s work, the artist is not all seeing and all knowing, they are not elevated, or drawn-out as special, not as seer, constructor, engineer, or architect. Thus, without directly addressing The Constructor, or the issue of gender specifically, First Roll can be seen as a sly decolonization of the primacy of the male gendered creator figure, and a powerful comment on the importance of inclusivity and collaboration in her practice. The idea of inclusivity, of collaboration—and connection—between artist, sitter, and viewer is a critical part of Tomanova’s practice, one that is evident in her portrait work.
This can be seen in her long-time extended portrait practice with collaborators such as Kate beginning in 2017 and continuing to the present. Tomanova’s fourth book, Kate, For You (Untitled 2025) makes Kate its subject, as does her spring 2025 exhibition with the same title at Moravian Gallery in Brno, Czech Republic. In Tomanova’s short film, Kate 2025 (2025), Kate views for the first time all the photographs in First Roll and discusses them in terms of how she has changed—the shifts and permutations of her identity, of her self, since the eight years ago when the photographs were first created in 2017.
Collaboration, the idea of working together, is something for which Tomanova was conditioned growing up with the still-present, deep, generational reverberations of socialism in the Czech Republic, ones, which perhaps ironically, were part of and disseminated with the New Vision in images like The Constructor. On one hand, The Constructor presents the artist as worker, which in 1924 was progressive, but today the image cannot hide the privilege or gender of this worker; it cannot hide the primacy of his eye nor of his hand.
Leaving aside the political ideology furthered by El Lissitzsky’s image, The Constructor is not too far removed from those Enlightenment-era portraits of great men, with the light falling on their high foreheads to indicate intelligence. Importantly, while El Lissitzy’s image breaks formally—and perhaps more significantly by the use of the photographic medium—with Enlightenment image making, it still maintains the underlying Enlightenment values of order, reason, and rationality associated with the visionary male gaze. This shift, however, from the Enlightenment head to the photographic eye, and the hand, is not inconsequential. In highlighting the eye, hand, and layering of meaning provided by the montage of multiple exposures (six), El Lissitzky defines a shift in what a photograph can be, of how the world can be seen, of how it can be shaped, or defined, of how it can be represented photographically. Naturally, László Moholy-Nagy’s seminal 1925 book Painting Photography Film comes to mind in codifying the creative use of visual media such as photography and film.
It is at this point that some commonalities between El Lissitzky’s six image photographic montage and Tomanova’s 36 photographic frames may be explored, in that each is breaking with the idea of using a single-frame photograph to communicate meaning. In each, meaning is accreted. In The Constructor, meaning is revealed in layers, almost archaeologically (rather obliquely, the work of Gordon Matta-Clark comes to mind, as well as that of Michael Foucault). In First Roll, however, meaning is accreted in a more linear—a more narrative—manner.
Unlike The Constructor, which can be read very photographically as a single moment, again emphasizing the universalist, exclusive singularity of the artist’s vision as a creator—as constructor—First Roll has a definite beginning and end. It stretches from the first frame to the last in an unbroken chain documenting precisely and sharing openly with the viewer Tomanova’s experience and connection that afternoon with Kate and Odie. In this way, as a virtually complete narrative of a short period of time on that afternoon in June in the bathroom of Kate and Odie, it is easy to view First Roll as cinematic, filmic. And as a part of Tomanova’s work in longitudinal portraiture, such as that of Kate, with whom she has continued to photograph until the present day, it would be very satisfying to locate the essence of First Roll as the beginning of the same sort of project that François Truffaut embarked with Antoine Doinel with 400 Blows. But that would be a mistake. First Roll is not fictional, and Kate is herself, whereas Doinel is played by actor Jean-Pierre Léaud. First Roll is based in the real moments that can define photography—Kate and Odie were absolutely in front of Tomanova’s camera. They were all there. This all being there—connected through the lens, sharing the experience of that pivotal afternoon in 2017—is the essence of the First Roll.
When that one roll of 36-exposure film was exposed, processed, and viewed, it was never intended to be exhibited or shown in its entirety as First Roll. Indeed, it was parsed out, edited—a selection process was applied—and the photograph Kate and Odie (2017), the key image for FOTO WIEN 2025, was chosen for the cover of Tomanova’s first book, Young American (2019), with Introduction by photographer Ryan McGinley, one of Tomanova’s early influences (alongside Francesca Woodman, Nan Goldin, Ana Mendieta, and Cindy Sherman). That photograph of Kate and Odie was singled-out as one of almost iconic proportions; with the release of Young American, a project that resonated globally, the photograph of Kate and Odie was front and center, almost always, dozens, if not hundreds, of times. As I wrote in my Introduction to Tomanova’s fourth book, Kate, For You:
And, of course, there was that one image, Kate and Odie, that went around the world in a flurry.
If images gain power as they travel across multiple networks and nodes, taking on a life of their own to engage with socio-political issues as they circulate, as art historian David Joselit argues in his 2012 book After Art, Tomanova's Kate and Odie is that sort of image. Emerging in 2019 as the cover of her Young American book, the image began to circulate widely and internationally, emblematizing a body of work that was a projection of Tomanova's ideal for America, an ideal that she felt was under siege by conservative forces of intolerance and hate, which frightened her at the time, living as an undocumented person in the United States. Kate and Odie and the dozens of portraits of young individuals in Young American became a balm, or an ideological antidote for the politically chilling realities and machinations of 2019, realities that seem to be reasserting themselves globally even more forcefully, or have never abated at all.
If images gain power as they travel across multiple networks and nodes, taking on a life of their own to engage with socio-political issues as they circulate, as art historian David Joselit argues in his 2012 book After Art, Tomanova's Kate and Odie is that sort of image. Emerging in 2019 as the cover of her Young American book, the image began to circulate widely and internationally, emblematizing a body of work that was a projection of Tomanova's ideal for America, an ideal that she felt was under siege by conservative forces of intolerance and hate, which frightened her at the time, living as an undocumented person in the United States. Kate and Odie and the dozens of portraits of young individuals in Young American became a balm, or an ideological antidote for the politically chilling realities and machinations of 2019, realities that seem to be reasserting themselves globally even more forcefully, or have never abated at all.
Against a background of intolerance, Tomanova’s Kate and Odie emerges as a vital and hopeful hallmark for new, positive attitudes and freedom in regard to individual expression, particularly to gender and gender identity. McGinley wrote poignantly on this in his Introduction to the book Young American, “This is a future free of gender binaries and stale old definitions of beauty. In Marie’s world people can just simply be. I wish all of America’s youth culture looked like Marie’s photos of Downtown, diverse and inclusive.”
In order to get to this place, to do this photography, Tomanova had to shed her past and it may be important to restate in slightly different terms that Young American is a project of portraits of American youth with whom Tomanova herself identified during the conservative, turbulent and difficult times she experienced living undocumented in the United States, after leaving the Czech Republic feeling a failed artist due to the oppressively misogynistic environment of her MFA painting program. It was a program that carried with it a very strong bias not only for the same Enlightenment-era academic painting style, but also for the conceptual soil out of which flowered El Lissitzky’s The Constructor and the primacy of male ego…and vision. I wonder if Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” should be required reading in all MFA programs. While it is likely unfair to make too much of this conceivably tired argument, it should still be pointed out that an artist such as Toyen is still not considered in the same way as Alphonse Mucha or František Kupka. And speaking a bit closer to home in the field of photography, it is hard to imagine a photographer—even Libuše Jarcovjáková (or Tomanova herself, for that matter)—escaping the shadow of Josef Koudelka…or the value bestowed upon his eye.
And perhaps—apart from bringing the viewer into the experience of that afternoon, sharing the connection—the strength of Tomanova’s First Roll, and perhaps that of Tomanova’s work overall, is that it shifts the primacy of the eye, which has been central to the conception of photography, from the photographer to the viewer themselves. This is a New Vision circa 2025. It is yours.
—Thomas Beachdel