This is an odyssey to the country my parents were born in. My trip involves visits to cafés and sights and pubs and a soak in the tradition in this changing city. I saw an exhibition by Josef Sudek who was Czech and took many photos of Prague. I want to know about Czech culture and it has influenced me greatly. I am English, I am Czech, and what that means is up to me.
First I found the folk festival on two large stages in the centre of town. I remember being shown the traditional costumes as a child and learnt about being Czech from it. The cakes, the food, the dolls and toys, cut glass and later beer. There were all nationalities on the stages, showing off their skills. There was something similar about it all and a gentle atmosphere.
We visited four cafes in Prague. All of them were beautiful and from another time. The architecture in Prague is art nouveau and very decorative. It is also a medieval, gothic, cubist, renaissance and neo-classical city. I saw people sitting alone reading classic books and fancifully staring while sipping a cup of tea. A friend told me about their time teaching English in Prague and everyone would sit in a café talking about how they were writing a novel, and she then found they were also teaching English.
Café Imperial
I heard a heated debate about deep thoughts about what art should be in the Café Louvre. This was also where the Josef Sudek exhibition was. Why can’t we talk about these things? Even if we might sound pretentious.
Upstairs at the Louvre was fashioned like a French café with traditional Czech cakes, food and even a billiard room. Downstairs (photographed above) was modern and had upside down flower pots hanging from the ceiling (how?) and this was where the gallery was. It was one room and there was easy-listening music being played. This gave the whole place a relaxed atmosphere and they let me take photographs of all the work.
The first photographs I saw were poetic black and white pictures:
This classical fruit and bowl is simple and light but there is something personal and introverted about it. The tone is muted and quiet. The reflections in the picture from the surrounding space are interesting to me as they are part of how the work is seen.
The interest in light and ephemeral or transparent surfaces is investigated in all the work in this exhibition.
The artist’s pictures are very sensitive and play with the medium of photography, which picks up light very sensitively as well.
The most attention came for this picture and the relatively empty gallery had a crowd around this image.
The seated man is, on second glance, transparent below the waist. He is sitting in a garden but you are not sure if he is really there or if he is a ghost. You can see the whole gallery in the picture I have taken. The gloss of the photos was also interesting and there was one dark photo of a sculpture’s head, which showed your reflection in the same place as its head when you looked at the photo. The viewers look like ghosts too.
This reminded me of how it feels to be in such a historic city where you brush with the past. There were also photographs by Sudek that looked at the light in snowy or misty weather. He is an interesting figure, losing a hand in the war, he took photographs and became a popular and mysterious figure who did not attend his gallery openings. His pictures seem tied to Prague because they remind me of all the tourist pictures of Charles Bridge taken on a frosty morning.
In black and white the medieval city of a hundred spires, cubist rooftops and painted walls gathers around a castle sitting above, looming over the shaded narrow streets in the labyrinthine old town. Home of Kafka and Capek and from the café culture to flowing litres of beer drunk in public houses, chinking the precious liquid in heavy glasses. Opera and jazz, with the most sublime backdrop, ethereal as could be.
As the flight home leaves me exhausted, I am landed and fed up of fancy and romance. Well we all need to be a bit grounded eventually. It’s gritty realism and ***k you irony I feel like now….
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