Josef Sudek

Anna Fárová

A biographical profile of the Czechoslovakian photographer accompanies a collection of his photographs portraying his life, work, and views of Prague

Poet of Prague

Martin Heller

Iren Stehli

Milena Hübschmannová

For almost 30 years, Swiss photographer Iren Stehli followed the life of Libuna, a gypsy living in Prague, and her family. This book is a moving long-term study, a precise and close look at a life on the margins of Eastern European society under Communism and after the Velvet Revolution. It's a saga of love, tenderness, and pain, a testimony to Libuna's indomitable strength and lust for life. Not only an innovative and sensitive chronicle of the ups and downs of a woman's life, the rich details of the images in Libuna outline a history of everyday life and popular culture in the former Eastern Block. At the same time, pictures and captions represent an exploration of photography's possibilities and the ways in which it can preserve the intensities of the lived moment. Libuna is striking proof that photography's secret is neither sensationalism nor the concoction of flashy phantasmagorias, but the patient and humble search for images that transform glimpses of the world into small epiphanies, refractions of the world's ineffable truth.

A Gypsy's Life in Prague

Iren Stehli: Libuna

Frantisek Drtikol

Rudolf Kicken

Annette Kicken

This survey of Iren Stehli's images from 1973 to 2001 captures Czech life over an intense three decades. The artist, born in Zurich in 1953, studied photography in Prague in the mid-70s. In the late 60s, her adopted country had begun to stir under the hand of communism--and been punished for it. By the middle of her career, in 1989, the embattled communist government resigned, passing power to playwright Vaclav Havel in the Velvet Revolution. The swift changes that followed have brought what is now the Czech Republic into the European Union. Stehli's human stories of that era alternate with conceptual series, both of which share a characteristic poetry and humor. The thematically arranged chapters of Iren Stehli offer a compact overview of her oeuvre, and subtle, compelling testimony to the last decades of Czechoslovakian socialism and the transformation into a free-market democracy. Her previous book is Libuna: A Gypsy's Life in Prague.

Dvě tváře

Eva Davidová

Jana Horváthová

Dušan Šimánek

Lenka Lindaurová

Despite Dusan Siminek's distinctive, deliberate and sophisticated aesthetic, and despite occasional solo shows, his art photography has rarely been presented as such. Perhaps that's because he's better known for (and busier with) journalism, advertising, fashion and portraiture--work that attracts considerable attention of its own. This collection of the color and black-and-white work he has made for personal pleasure--for art's sake--over the past three decades seeks to reverse that dynamic. In several thematically arranged sections, this first book dedicated to Simanek's art photography traces his style as it has developed, and analyzes the seeming abstractions that are, on closer look, rooted in reality. With essays by the leading Czech historian of photography Anna Farova and art critic Lenka Lindaurova.

Anna Fárová

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