Roman Franc: Groups Collective

Roman Franc: Groups Collective

Mar 6–Jun 7, 2026

Roman Franc is a renowned, Czech photographer who works in large format film photography, trained and influenced by the tradition of Brno photographic craft. His Groups Collective series offers deeply human, tender, humorous, and sociological looks at the ways people create community and identity through the groups to which they belong. In the solo exhibition Roman Franc: Groups Collective the Contemporary will be featuring a selection of his group portraits along with newly commissioned photographs of groups rooted in the San Antonio area.

Franc has been assembling and documenting groups in villages and cities across the Czech Republic and beyond. He also makes work collaboratively with UK based photographer Jon Tonks. In the constructing of the group portraits Franc engages his sitters to inspire playful and unexpected representations.  He reactivates the disappearing ritual of coming together to be photographed making images which transcend formal, stiff conventions of posed portrait sittings, and in themselves build community through the experience.