domů Sitemap
lang: cz | eng
| Author: | Josef Moucha |
| Category: | Books, Photography |
| Language: | English and Czech |
| Page count: | 116 |
| Binding: | Hbk |
| ISBN: | 978-80-7437-239-1 |
| EAN: | 9788074372391 |
| Date: | 2017 |
| Issue number: | 1. |
| Price: | 22 EUR |
| Size: | 21 x 23 cm |
| buy in e-shop | |
This is the first publication in book form of the photographic set Serving It Cold: Photographs from Basic Training in the Czechoslovak People’s Army. It is a parable about whirling round a core of nothingness. The photographs reveal the world of men dragged into a trap that pretends to be a game about being soldiers. Today, many years after they were first taken, these original photographs by Josef Moucha seem like ghostly dirty tricks, staged with numerous extras in expensive stage sets. In fact, they are shots taken at the start of the 1980s, an unembellished, realistic look from inside.
The photographs are introduced by Vladimír Birgus, a respected photographer and expert on photography: ‘It is the complexity of Moucha’s photographic diary from the army which contributes to his photographs evoking a geyser of recollections in everyone who experienced compulsory military service under Communist rule.’ ‘Unique amongst Czech documentary photographs,’ he remarks, ‘the set provides a many-layered view of compulsory military service in the years of the restored hard-line Communist regime, after the crushing of the Prague Spring reform movement in August 1968. In quality, size, and authenticity it is unparalleled in Czech post-war photography. [...] Their importance has become more evident with the passing of so many years, because they are not only the photographic diary of one conscript; they are also wide-ranging testimony about that period and about the conflict between individualism and totalitarianism.
Text Vladimír Birgus
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.