Czech Photography VIII: Europeans

Three generations of Czech documentary photography meet in Europeans, a 2009 book built around Vladimir Birgus, Jindrich Marco, and Jindrich Streit's shared eye for ordinary life across the continent.

Published by KANT for an exhibition at the Leica Gallery in New York in 2009, later shown at the Month of Photography festival in Vienna, the book gathers work by three photographers spanning half a century of Czech practice. Marco, who died in 2000, contributes postwar images of central European cities rebuilding after 1945; Streit brings his long-running documentary studies of rural village life; Birgus, who also edited the volume, adds a more recent body of street and social photography. The three series together read as a survey of European daily life from the ruins of the war years to the present.

The book carries the number VIII in KANT's Czech Photography series, the project through which Birgus has become the leading historian and anthologist of Czech photography, later producing the wide-ranging survey Czech Photography of the 20th Century with Jan Mlcoch. Europeans belongs to that larger effort to place Czech documentary work, long isolated behind the Iron Curtain, alongside the European tradition it always belonged to.