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Scenes from a vanishing world

A Czech photographer finds universal truths in simple settings
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By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
December 12th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Manual labor is one of the common denominators in Štreit's studies of village life.
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Jindřich Štreit

Photographs 1965–2005
Prague City Gallery–House
at the Stone Bell
Ends Feb. 3, 2008

COURTESY PHOTO
A full sack of potatoes and a rare opportunity to relax.
Jindřich Štreit chronicles life in Czech villages, both during and after communism, better than anyone else. In his first full retrospective, 190 photos taken from 1965 to 2005 document a way of life that is now practically extinct in the Czech lands. His photos also show a commonality among villagers in countries near and far.
Born in 1946, Štreit is originally from a village in Moravia. He studied art education at Palacký University in Olomouc, graduating in 1963, and taught at various primary schools, eventually becoming headmaster at a school in the Moravian village of Sovinec. Around that time, in the early 1970s, he also began doing his own photography and organizing exhibits in Sovinec for “unofficial” artists, mostly from Prague.
Štreit has always concentrated on documentary photography, particularly in rural or agricultural settings. While his photos did not necessarily have a political motivation, they revealed such a bleak way of life under communism that his work was not much appreciated by the authorities.
His involvement with and support of “unofficial” artists also eventually got him into trouble. In 1982, after he participated in an unsanctioned art exhibition in Prague, Štreit’s negatives, photos and camera were confiscated by the secret police on the grounds of preventing him from committing further “criminal activity.” He was also sentenced to 10 months in prison for “defamation of the republic and the head of state.”
After his release in 1983, he was banned from teaching. He then worked as a manual laborer, eventually becoming transportation manager at a state-run farm in the village of Rýžoviště, outside Bruntál, near the Polish border.
Under such conditions, Štreit took to documentary photography and other cultural activities with even more zeal than before. The first floor of the current exhibition begins with photos from Štreit’s series “Village Is a World,” which includes many scenes of everyday life in Sovinec and villages around Bruntál.
The photos portray a range of people, old and young, agricultural workers and civil servants, on duty and off. There is a ragged brigade of teenage volunteer firemen, older men and women working the soil, or enjoying time in a pub. Štreit captures a panel of stodgy-looking judges listening to children’s solo music recitals in a barren room, while a group of women in the back drink beer. His Czech villagers are tired people in action — at work and at play, drinking heavily, but hardly ever doing nothing. The landscape we see is a desolate one, but it’s populated by people with a lot of heart, and thus not completely hopeless.
One photo from 1985, taken in the village of Arnoltice, shows a group of workers sitting beside a mountain of potatoes. The older men and women are resting and smiling as one standing woman takes a long swig of alcohol from a bottle, bringing to mind the common saying under socialism, “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”
One of the best sections is a smaller room filled solely with photos of people watching television — alone, as couples, as families or even entire villages. All eyes are fixed on the TV set, and Štreit captures the villagers’ fascination with their TVs in any setting.
The second floor of the exhibition is dedicated to photos made after the 1989 revolution. Not surprisingly, many were taken outside of Štreit’s usual Czech village milieu. Yet his interest in photographing villages around Bruntál and the Olomouc region did not decline.
He remained an employee of the state-owned farm until 1991, and this brought him an invitation to visit agricultural workers in France. Other projects abroad followed, which enabled him to travel to the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Russia and Japan. It is interesting that, despite Štreit’s travels, his subjects remain constant: village life, agricultural workers, people drinking in pubs or at home, elderly people (working or retired) and children.
In rural post-communist Europe, especially in the Hungarian Puszta and in locations in the former Soviet Union, including Buryatia, Ingushetia and Chechnya, as well as in his local Bruntál, the village world of centuries-old traditions and characters seem under attack by our modern lifestyle. There is a photo taken in Vracov of an old woman scolding a bemused punk rocker (1995) from Štreit’s series “People from Podlesí.” And from his series “The Road toward Freedom,” there is a young woman eagerly sniffing marijuana plants; another picture shows a young woman shooting up. At the end of the show there are captivating shots of people with mental illness and physical disabilities, similar in spirit to the timeless images of Diane Arbus.
Štreit’s absurd reality already rings nostalgic, now that the way of life he documents is being replaced by modern capitalism. Life in rural villages remains tough, and the farmers still look ragged, through increasingly less insulated. In comparison, the scenes of modernized and domesticated villages in France and England seem to lack the spirit and fullness of life that Štreit finds in villages in the Czech lands and further east.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at features@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (12/12/2007):

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