Documenting the dispossessed

The foremost Czech documentary photographer is not comfortable with his title. "I accept that I'm seen as a documentary photographer," he says. "But, when I used to be sent on assignments by newspapers and magazines, they usually didn't publish my pictures. I am not a storyteller. I don't care about the situation, and I'm not explaining what happened. The point is always the human being."

Visitors to Jaroslav Kučera's exhibitions will realize that certain people interest him more than others. Kučera's world is populated by prostitutes, thieves, pimps and pushers, drug-addicts, alcoholics and the dispossessed.

"I don't want to judge anyone," he said Dec. 9, champagne in hand, during the final night of an exhibition at the Zentiva Centre. "I want to take people into a place they would not usually visit and show them what life is like."

Born in central Bohemia in 1946, Kučera began taking photos as a child ("mostly of the girls I liked"), learning to use a camera from his father, an amateur photographer. In the mid 1960s, he moved to Prague to study civil engineering and co-founded the Strahov Photo Club, which helped cultivate talents like Miroslav Machotka, Zdeněk Lhoták and Eva Hejdová. He finished his degree to please his parents, but knew he was treading water until he could work as a photographer.

Kučera emerged in his early collections as a confident presence in Czech photography drawn toward the underbelly of socialist life in collections like "Retirement Home" (1972), "One-Night Lovers" (1974) and "Juvenile Detention" (1974).

"He is one of the few Czech photographers who can find his way to anybody [and] enter their world," says Daniela Mrázková, the head of Czech Press Photo. "It's a great talent to be considered a friend not a photographer."

This knack helps the images, from his early student photos of naked lovers embracing, to recent portraits of prostitutes at home. The pictures are so intimate that, walking through one of his exhibitions, it seems Kučera captures what happens the second any other person would look away.

He looks through his collected works as if it were a family photo album.

"These were my good friends," Kučera says, pausing over a photo of homeless people drinking on a bench. "I would go begging with them."

Arrested and tortured for dissident activity in 1969, Kučera's early career was a struggle. Every picture had to be checked by authorities. He and a group of friends took pictures they knew could not be published "in the hope of better times," he says, "and maybe also for the sake of our souls." Among them was the well-known cycle "Moldova," which came out of visits to his first wife's family.

It was never Kučera's plan to document socialist life, he says, because "I always had one foot outside the country." But three or four emigration plans failed, so he was in Prague in November 1989, when he took some of his most famous pictures. His ability to provide the definitive image of moments captured by dozens of other photographers demonstrated his impressive skill as a photojournalist. In 2000, he received first prize in the news category from the Fuji Euro Press Photo panel. "But I never wanted to be a [news] photographer," he says. "You have to be so tough."

Kučera is not entirely at home in the art photography scene, either.

"The fashion now is for stupid photography. Someone photographs a field in extreme conditions and blows them up really big." He laughs. "Talking like that, I sound old, traditionalist, conservative ? But maybe that is how it should be nowadays."

Since the Revolution, Kučera's two principle cycles have been Prague's dispossessed and Sudeten poverty. Sudetenland was a particularly fascinating subject, he says, because of the ravaging of the land by industry, rootless populations, the decline of the church and borderland prostitution. Asked why such things are interesting, Kučera shrugs.

"Regular life is really boring."

Natalia O'Hara can be reached at
features@praguepost.com