Czech and Slovak Photo Publications 1918-1989

Czech and Slovak Photo Publications 1918-1989 is a reference survey of the photobooks and printed photography that came out of Czechoslovakia across seven decades of independence, occupation, and Communist rule.

Compiled by the photobook historian Manfred Heiting to mark the hundredth anniversary of the Czechoslovak Republic's founding in 1918, the book surveys more than 800 publications across nine chapters, with contributions from Vojtech Lahoda, Amanda Maddox, Petr Roubal, James Steerman, and Thomas Wiegand. It covers the work of over 250 photographers and graphic artists, from the interwar avant-garde of Jaroslav Rössler, Jindrich Štyrský, and Karel Teige through Josef Sudek, František Drtikol, and Josef Koudelka, tracing how book design and photographic publishing carried the country's visual culture through Nazi annexation and forty years of Communist control. The 516-page hardback reproduces more than 2,800 images from the books themselves.

Heiting is a photobook collector and historian whose Steidl series, Collection Manfred Heiting, has produced comparable national surveys of the photobook in other countries. This volume extends that project to a region whose publishing history, shaped as much by censorship as by design innovation, is otherwise thinly documented outside specialist collections.