Only till May 29 in the exhibition hall of the National History Museum of Latvia, at Brīvības bulvāris 32, in collaboration with the Embassy of Czech Republic in Latvia the exhibition “Prague through the Lens of the Secret Police” is held.
The photographs presented in this exhibition were not created with any artistic intentions. They were taken by people who were not looking for artistic glory, but who were driven by their desire for power and their need to wield control over others. They were people who were morally twisted and wicked at heart. In spite of this, in providing a most faithful portrait of the reality of life in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 80s, these photographs have an unusually artistic quality. The photographers of the Communist secret police (Státní bezpečnost – StB) were genuine masters when it came to capturing all the loathsomeness of everyday life during the “normalization” era of hard-line socialist entrenchment that followed the Soviet-led occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. It’s no wonder. After all, they were the very people who helped create this awful world as part of the Communist machinery of power.
Their photographs are extraordinary documentary material. Most of them were taken in such a way that their author had no idea what exactly was being captured in the shot. They didn’t put the camera to their eye to select the boundaries for the scene they were shooting, or to compose the entire shot. The camera was hidden under their coat, in a suitcase or in a handbag. They released the shutter at moments when they felt the “subject” (as the secret police referred to the people they tailed) of their interest was in front of the hidden lens. Consequently, these negatives inadvertently contained many details of Prague during the normalization era that those taking the pictures would have ignored if they had been photographing in a controlled manner with a viewfinder.
The Prague we see is full of scaffolding, peeling facades and socialist-era cars with twostroke engines. A town without tourists, stands, restaurant gardens and advertisements. It is a grey, dark city with empty streets, at first glance dead. The people walking the streets of Prague, who were accidentally captured by cameras being used to watch others, have mostly withdrawn faces, seemingly clouded with fear. If in today’s society there is an upsurge in sentimental feeling for Gustav Husák’s “dumpling socialism,” then these pictures offer a glimpse of a completely different Czechoslovakia than that presented in television series from the normalization era and the pop songs of that period, which portray it as a time when life was lived “non-stop”.
On the contrary, this is a world that has come to a complete “stop”. In a desperate state of stasis “life must sink to a biological, vegetable level,” is how Václav Havel described this situation in an open letter to Gustav Husák in 1975: “Despair leads to apathy, apathy to conformity, conformity to routine performance – which is then quoted as evidence of ‘mass political involvement.’ All this goes to make up the contemporary concept of ‘normal’ behavior – a concept which is, in essence, deeply pessimistic.”
It’s symbolic: the only people who appear relatively relaxed in the pictures are the “subjects” of surveillance themselves. They were the ones for whom the political police employed dozens of people to document even the most banal situations of their private life – who they were seen with, what they said, what they ate, bought, read, and who they slept with. Nevertheless, it is evident from the pictures taken throughout this tiresome pursuit that those being monitored retained their inner freedom. They smile in the pictures, occasionally even grin at the secret photographers when they realize that their constant presence nearby cannot be simply a coincidence.
An important work of art can also sometimes be created by people of whom it would not have been expected. Among other things, the 20th century produced psychotics and mentally disturbed individuals who were able to use their illness to make artistic statements of unprecedented intensity. They paint and draw the world as they see it through their eyes. It is portrayed as a place where love and purity are often trumped by malice and darkness. The members of the secret police were also sick. They were employees of a psychotic state apparatus, whose task was to mold other people, gripped by a malevolence that was meant to remain here forever. And they, too, unwittingly gave expression to their illness, which from today’s perspective can be seen as an artistic representation of the events of the time.
The material presented is not intended to change the history of Czech documentary photography. It will not surpass the testimony concerning the normalization era that has been submitted by Jindřich Štreit, Dana Kyndrová, Viktor Kolář, Jaroslav Kučera, Jaromír Čejka, Markéta Luskačová and Zdeněk Lhoták. Nevertheless, it is an important contribution, which in many ways adds something valuable to this information.
The exhibition “Prague through the Lens of the Secret Police,” organized jointly by the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes and the Security Services Archive, features a selection of photographs taken by servicemen of the (communist) Secret Police’s (StB) Surveillance Directorate between 1969-89, as well as complementary explanatory texts in English, Czech and also Latvian.
The exhibition premiere took place on April 7, 2009 at the Permanent Representation of the Czech Republic to the European Union in Brussels, where it was on view through the end of that month within the scope of the Czech Republic’s presidency of the EU Council. It has been designed as a travelling exhibition; audiences around Europe and the United States have had the opportunity to view it.