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 PHOTOGRAPHIC DISCOVERIES IN SOUTHERN BOHEMIA, 1976

In the summer of 1976 I spent part of my holidays in Czechoslovakia. I had just started work as a staffmember of a youth creativity centre in Amsterdam’s old city (responsible for film, video and photography activities) and decided to spend my holidays bicycling through Southern Bohemia.  It was actually the first trip I took with the express purpose of photography in mind. And in that respect it was a most inspiring and successful journey. After a long trainride I spent a lovely first week in Prague at the home of a friend of my father’s and his family. I saw the sights, went nuts over the beautiful old streets, wonderful ancient doors and windows, loved the beer and generally enjoyed myself tremendously. After that I was planning to cycle for three weeks through Bohemia. 

 

My host in Prague and his family, a young me and my silver bike, summer 1976. If anybody recognizes the people in this picture, please, contact me!

I must say that the bicycle trip was disappointing to such a degree that I cut it short and left Czechoslovakia after two weeks by crossing into Austria. Why? The weather was great, I saw some beautiful country, great towns and villages, castles, etcetera, in fact precisely what I had hoped for and expected. What I had not expected was the difficulty to connect and communicate with the people. It seemed most people I ran into did not trust me or were afraid to be seen talking to/interacting with an obvious foreigner. I am sure it had a lot to do with the oppressive Russian presence which could be seen and felt everywhere. I felt it myself and did not like it. So it became quite a lonely journey, something I was not used to at all after travelling in many European countries. Only once a young man of my own age made contact and invited me into his home where I spent an interesting evening eating, drinking and talking. He explained to me the difficulties of living under the all-seeing Russian eyes and also told me that many people probably thought I was an East-German, trying to find an escape route from behind the Iron Curtain. So even though I loved the scenery and everything else I saw around me, the loneliness got to me and after two weeks I rode my bike across the Austrian border after having ridden through that literal Iron Curtain with its watchtowers, dogs, barbed wire fences and stretches of no man’s land…

But I loved the photographic opportunities of my trip. I mostly shot slides, using East-German Orwo color slide 35mm film. Cheap at the time for us in Holland but they produced a quality product with warm colors that stood the time perfectly. Since I marked the slides with the names of the places I visited, I can still more or less recreate my trip: Pribram, Blatná, Milevsko, Tábor, Bechyně, Hluboká nad Vltavou, České Budějovice, Zvikov and Krumlov. Coming from the Netherlands my eye fell on the “old”: many aspects of life (houses, tools, transportation, etc) reminded me of a past long gone in my country where industrialization, renovation and modernization had wiped out “the old ways” already. All this is quite visible in the pictures I took. Of course, my lack of communication with people also prevented me from taking many portraits, which I regretted.

Anyway, I came home, showed the slides around somewhat and then forgot about them. Life went on with career, family and, always on the side: photography. The world changed and in 2004 I bought my first scanner. The slides and negatives of my travels were among the first to be digitalized with it. Unfortunately, not quite used yet to the digital world, I scanned them at quite a low resolution. In 2005 I uploaded many (also the Czech slides) to the then brand new photography site www.flickr.com  where for years they only got moderate attention (you can find he set here)

In approx. 2011 they were seen by Czech artist Jindra Noewi, now living in Florida, who told me how the sites I had photographed had now changed immensely. She promised to send me pictures of them when visiting her home country again.  She did so in 2013 but in fact did a lot more, trying to recreate some of the original pictures at their exact locations and shooting from the same angles. Together the shots offer a wonderful view of past and present: the beauty of decay, photographed in 1976 as opposed tot the recreation of a more glorious past in 2013. Under the title “Time Travel” the doubles have been published on flickr as well and can be found here.

In 2014 the original flickr set was also discovered in the Czech Republic itself. Today the individual pictures are amongst the most viewed on my flickr pages. Someone once told me they attract so many viewers because in the 1970’s color film was very scarce and expensive in Czechoslovakia, so there just isn’t much color material around of that time. 

Recently some renewed interest in the pictures reminded me of the fact that I never scanned all the Bohemian pictures at the time. I dug up the slides and scanned all 130 of them; many more than the 47 shots of the original 2005 Flickr set. Not all of them are great shots, the technical and photographic quality of some is not really up to par but I uploaded them here anyway for their possible historical value. They show some of the things that struck me as a young Western tourist in times long past...

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 Ard Hesselink (Utrecht, the Netherlands, 1951) worked in film and television programming, media journalism and education. He is currently living in the northern province of Groningen where he runs a small photography gallery and works on different book- and exhibition projects. (www.docmansdays.blogspot.nl )