Fotograf Zone – Libuše Jarcovjáková

She was nominated for the award by Jan H. Vitvar, cultural editor at Respekt magazine, in respect to the publication of her journal-memoir Černé roky (Black Years). However, his justification could also be applied to Evokativ, the album under review: “Libuše Jarcovjáková, creating at the edges of both the art scene and society, has shown herself to be one of the most important figures in the history of Czech photography. This is not an overstatement. Her prerevolution work has no local equals in its intensity, honesty, and energy, and in many respects surpasses the international photographers whose work has been taught at universities for decades.”

This new book was published to accompany a retrospective attached to the Rencontres d’Arles 2019 festival. The British daily The Guardian declared Evokativ the exhibition of the year. This dual event is rightly considered a suggestive reckoning of

the 1970s and 1980s. It captured the visual core of how the photographer lived. (As for words, the author limited herself only to a succinct summary of her memories.)

Although Jarcovjáková’s life in her native Prague was a hellish spiral of hopelessness, she managed to graduate from the photography department at FAMU. I borrowed her diploma opus on Robert Frank and read it with interest. It is no accident that what I find in her notes is what inspired and captivated her about Frank: “He stopped showing pictures and started showing emotions. With that, he opened a new space in photography.”

For Jarcovjáková, gradually publishing her observations at the time these were made was unthinkable. Certainly not in the clearly delineated selection which is now receiving such accolades. The photographer would have unmasked the people in her snapshots. And she also would have become a dangerous snitch. This was, after all, a time of Communist rule—rule reinforced by various repressive bodies including the secret police, which was certainly not above blackmail. Jarcovjáková, then, was chiefly shooting pictures for herself. Perhaps as memories but definitely with a passion bordering on obsession. She told Reportér magazine that she had negatives of every phase of her daily parties: “Going out, sitting in the pub, coming back home.”

The editor of Evokativ is Lucie Černá: she determined the order of the reproductions, connected the optics of the exhibition into a narrative of images, and wrote the epilogue. Perhaps only those who have gone through such an ordeal can suspect what lurks behind the austere information in the masthead. A superb performance, I’d say! This first production by a new publisher, Untitled, clocks in at 188 pages in a representative 210 × 275 mm format. The language chosen is English. The graphic design was both functionally and aestheti- cally prepared by Ania Nałęcka-Milach.

The epilogue (and the publisher’s blurb) promote Evokativ as an authentic document of the artist’s life. The whirl of the nights in the metropolis, casual relationships, and alcoholic and sexual excesses are captured without aesthetic calculation and without concern for badly framed shots. A significant element is the overexposure of the foreground through copious use of flash. Supposedly, it represents a personal style based on a combination of raw non-embellishment with a poetic quality. The pictorial composition, however, is arranged from positions of hindsight, which are therefore informed by the directness which users of photography often employ today. Images like these, which alternate with improvised self-portraits, are now made by every Tom, Dick, and Harry, but the newly discovered classic Libuše Jarcovjáková has her inexhaustibly loaded and irreplaceable past.

Text | Josef Moucha

Josef Moucha

(1956) is a photographer and teacher at the Institute of Creative Photography of Silesian University in Opava. He has published essays Zážitek arény (The Experience of the Arena, 2004), a novella, Mimochodem (By the Way, 2004), essays Obrazy z dějin fotografie české (Images from the History of Czech Photography, 2011) and two picture books, Válka za studena / Fotografie ze základní vojenské služby v Československé lidové armádě (Serving It Cold: Photographs from Basic Training in the Czechoslovak People’s Army, 2017) and Doličné okamžiky (Incriminating Moments, 2018).

Libuše Jarcovjáková

is currently one of the most influential and visible Czech photographers at home and abroad. She has long photographed the Romani and Vietnamese communities in Czechoslovakia, as well as Prague's famous LGBTQ bar, T-Club. After 1985 she legally moved to West Berlin. After returning to the Czech Republic in 1992, she began teaching photography at a number of art colleges. Her original photography books Černé roky (2017) and Evokativ (2019) are among the gems of their genre.

#36 New Utopias

We understand the phenomenon of Utopia as a problematically broad concept. For this reason we will try to anchor it primarily in the field of political economy, and to present it to the reader through the prism of the most contemporary artistic and theoretical interpretations. Today, the term utopia is often interpreted primarily as a historical term that does not bring much new, and which, in society generally, is primarily related to the past. In the case of visual culture and art, it is particularly associated with modernist architectural visions expressing ideas of the new organization of society. We want to avoid this kind of simplistic approach that buries itself in history. Of course, we cannot ignore some major projects, such as the Black Panthers political movement; Black Mountain College art education; the architecture of the Florentine radical designers, UFO, Superstudio, or 9999; or the projects of Le Corbusier or the Bauhaus school. It is always necessary, however, to offer an insight into how we relate to these ideas today and thus how they are treated in the realm of the image. Our basis for interpreting the idea of utopia is for us the term commons, or joint sharing. It allows us to play out, in this issue, the search for new utopias in contemporary society. We ask how new possibilities of cooperation, coexistence, and the sharing of resources, information, and commodities are currently reflected in the visual arts (and, in regard to history, what are they drawing on)? We are interested in the fields of community and spiritual life, in new economic networks, radical pedagogy, current visions of the possibilities of the scientific exploration of the world, and in ways of creating new forms of social relations. We would like to try to find answers to what roles and forms of utopia there are in today’s society, which is labeled with so many dystopian terms (e.g. risky or post-truth), and by means of this thematic issue we want to offer a positive survey of possible solutions to current catastrophic data, scenarios and debates. In a time of “permanent crisis,” it is precisely solutions that are so much called for, but they are only rarely presented in art and theory. From the perspective of visual communication, besides photography, we will also turn more to the new possibilities of depiction that artists work with in order to prefigure new systems of communication and relationships. That is, work with the moving image, video games, and computer animations.