Jindřich Marco

ISBN: 978-80-7215-423-4|Published: 2011|Pages: 156
Binding: Softbound|Format: 160 x 180 mm|Graphic design: studio Najbrt

Jindřich Marco (1921–2000) was a leading Czech photojournalist, yet his work remains underappreciated. His photographs that have attracted the most attention are those dramatically depicting life returning to Berlin, Dresden, Warsaw, Budapest, and other cities destroyed during World War II, rather than photos of killing or conflagrations. Without seeking to evoke pity, while reflecting some of the personal experience of the photographer, who had shortly before been interned in a Nazi camp, they show ordinary men, women, and children, whose lives have been radically changed by war. They show the ghostly ruins of once grand houses, churches, and other buildings, human pain, suffering, humiliation, desperation, fear, and fatigue. But they also show the strength of people who, even after all the horrors, are determined to carry on. These photographs are not only documents of concrete places and times; they are also more universal symbols of the barbarity of war. Marco’s work also includes photo-essays on various other topics, which were, through the Black Star agency, published in major magazines in the second half of the 1940s, a number of picture books, photographs of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the Warsaw-Pact occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, romantic photos of the beauty of Prague, photographs of everyday life, stylized pictures of architectural fragments and various apparently unaesthetic objects, and also portraits of many important Czech artists. This volume, compiled by Vladimír Birgus, the Director of the Institute of Creative Photography, at Silesian University, Opava, publishes some of these works for the first time.