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| Author: | Vladimír Birgus |
| Category: | Books, Photography |
| Language: | Czech and English |
| Translation: | Derek Paton |
| Page count: | 88 |
| Binding: | Hbk |
| ISBN: | 978-80-7437-295-7 |
| EAN: | 9788074372957 |
| Date: | 2019 |
| Issue number: | 1. |
| Price: | 24 EUR |
| Size: | 28 x 24 cm |
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Many of Vladimír Birgus’s previously unpublished, raw photographs show life in various Czechoslovak cities, and also in Moscow, Warsaw, Tallinn, Riga, Sofia, and other large cities in the Soviet satellites in the 1970s and 1980s.
With an ironic sense of detachment, these distinctively subjective photographs show the era’s human and environmental degradation, the contrast between optimistic communist propaganda and gloomy reality and between the official world and private life. Jan Mlčoch, curator of the photographic collection at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, says of them: “They are not superficially political; they capture unsteady and lost figures, silent and gloomy men and women as they toil away for goods – of which there are never enough, if there are any at all. The cities are dilapidated stage sets of (seemingly) inevitable human fates. The black-and-white photographs’ grayscale perfectly captures the unchanging nature of the days and nights.”
Czech Photography of the 20th Century, published simultaneously in Czech and English versions, is the first book to present the main trends, figures, and works of Czech photography from the beginning to the end of the last century to such a large extent. Its 517 plates include not only the most important, well-known photographs and photomontages, but also works that have long been forgotten or are published for the first time. The book is arranged in seventeen chapters, supplemented with chronologies of the most important events in twentieth-century Czech photography and history.