TUESDAY, JULY 9
MEMORY LANE
For me, Prague is a city of memories. I visited several times when it was under communist rule, accompanying a Czech friend who had escaped, running for his life, just before the 1968 occupation. He left his pregnant wife and when he and I returned, soon before the Velvet Revolution, he met his son for the first time. Several times I accompanied him when he visited his elderly mother in a care facility. His sister would let us stay in her small apartment. She had an ingenious ability of making tasty food from almost no ingredients. I would follow her around her tiny, dark kitchen as she reached behind curtain-covered, low cabinets and pulling out stale bread and old potatoes. She would proceed to make the best soups with these ingredients, cabbage and vinegar.
I was too young to understand everything I was witnessing back then, a time of turbulent and momentous events, the outcome then unknown. Time would change Czechoslovakia so dramatically in the next few years, transforming it from iron-fisted rule to freedom under the guidance of a president/poet/philosopher. I never returned to free Prague with my friend, and lost touch with him over time. But we reconnected on this visit, on the phone, and I learned he, his wife and kids left the U.S. nine years before to return to Prague.
I travelled often with this friend, Antonin. We went through Europe, Turkey, Morocco, Pakistan and countries in South America. After the Berlin Wall came down, we travelled to Berlin for the first International Film Festival, held for the first time on both sides of the wall.
ASA400 DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY
Antonin Kratochvil is part of a cooperative of photo journalist, 400ASA. He has traveled the world documenting through photography and has covered wars, famines, photographed in prisons, among the persecuted and outcast, and in places in Eastern Europe of environmental devastation.
A show of 400ASA collective was on exhibition at the “new” National Gallery in the Fair Trade Palace. It included the work of Antonin and seven other photographers. The Gallery name is awkward but the space is clean and airy and just waiting to be filled with contemporary work. Architects have compared it to a Corbusier design.
The desk attendant, like waiters and attendants everywhere in Prague, was rude and bossy. The show was on the top or fifth floor. To get there, we were escorted to a glass (plexiglass) elevator that inched it’s way to the top, causing not just vertigo for me, but also Chloe. It was crazy slow and scary. We thought it might plunge to the ground at any minute. We could see the desk attendant and security guard who took us to the elevator watching us ascend.
Exiting the elevator, we entered a large room containing a video with images by the different photographers. It was a clever and evocative video/slide show, that placed the full image on the middle screen and details of the photograph on the side screens. The show itself consisted of small, three-sided rooms, made of portable walls. Inside each room was the work of one photographer.
ANTONIN KRATOCHVIL, MY FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPHER
Antonin’s work was featured. He is clearly “the father” of the group, many of the others attempting to emulate his style and focussing on subjects he’s worked with. His photographs are powerful both visually and emotionally. He has a particular ability to place subjects and objects in relationships that tell complete stories — of isolation, desperation, survival, loneliness. The other photos paled by comparison. Before leaving, we thumbed through his latest book, a retrospective of images from the many places he has been. He has witnessed so much in his life, layer upon layer of human injustice.
THE TALE OF FINDING FOOD
We had a really hard time settling on a place to eat. This happens too often when we don’t plan ahead. I think it’s common while travelling. We wandered the neighbourhood — quite interesting as it is where the art students hang out and there are many small galleries, chic restaurants and shops. Somehow we ended up eating take out pizza on two small chairs on the sidewalk outside the pizza shop. Not the most authentic Czech meal.
PRAGUE CASTLE
We jumped on a tram to the Prague Castle, purported to be the largest castle in Europe. From the tram stop we walked several blocks along a tree-lined walkway outside of the castle wall. It was a surprisingly cool day and felt more like fall than the middle of summer.
After passing through a metal detector and security, we turned down a path to a formal garden. Beside the path was a most bizarre scene — birds of prey and owls, tied to tree stumps, and on display. It cost 10 Crowns to take a photograph of them. We looked at the poor nocturnal owls trying to keep their eyes open. Chloe said, I think the people who did this should have to stand on a pedestal, tied to the ground, for a day.
PHOTOGRAPHY FROM VELVET REVOLUTION AND 1989
Soon distracted again by a sign for a photography exhibition, 1989, The Fall of the Iron Curtain, we headed off the main path. This show was a perfect compliment to Antonin’s show and our walking tour the day before.
Learning the history of a place and attempting to understand the lives of people who live there is, for us, the most interesting part of travel. I was walking down memory lane. Chloe was experience this history for the first time. We saw photographs from the Velvet Revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall, gatherings of Poles around Lech Walesa (I went to Poland with Antonin when he photographed Walesa) and the capture and execution of Nicolae Ceausescu (I visited Romania under his regime with Antonin). A photograph of people gathered at Wenceslaus Square actually brought goosebumps to my skin. The show includes 71 photographers.
By the time we reached the ticket office for the Castle, it was closed. We walked the grounds — felt like we were at the Vancouver Christmas Market, because of the quaint, little wooden food stands. We admired the grand St. Vitus Cathedral, which we had learned was usurped in size by St. Stephens in Vienna. A cobbled path led through the Castle walls to a bridge.
ARCHITECTURE = PSYCHE?
Next destination was the “Dancing House,” designed by Croatian-Czech architect Vlado Milunić in cooperation with Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry. Going there was more about the journey than the actual arrival at the House. It is an odd architectural site in a city so rich and full of diverse and beautiful architecture. The walk there offered up great examples of Art Nouveau buildings from the beginning of the 1900s. The color choices for buildings were some of the oddest I’ve ever seen. Mute greens, parched ochres, dirty pink.
Chloe took photos as we walked back, passing the synagogue and the Jewish area, on our way back to our Airbnb for our last night in Prague. We were intrigued by the city, and the strange dichotomy between the beauty around us and the serious nature of the people. I wondered if being surrounded by everything old and preserved — castles, churches, monuments, apartments — might dampen a city’s energy, create a feeling of living not in a breathing city but a museum. Maybe buildings, new buildings, enlivens people’s creative imaginations and are necessary to create the feeling of forward movement. Just a thought.
I told Chloe the story of the good soldier Svejk who acted a clown but all the while was conniving and manipulating situations. I think of the Czechs I’ve known. They don’t show their hands…and usually they are very clever hands.
