Hardcover, half cloth, concept and texts by Jan Jindra and Tomáš Pospěch, design by Milan Nedvěd.

In the 1980s, Jan Jindra (b. 1962) created several photographic series that in many respects differ from those of the remarkable contemporaneous wave of Czech documentary photography. In these works, Jindra has dramatically captured striking phenomena of the times, which were hardly as sweet as portrayed in socialist TV series. He looked for subject matter that would say something about the disintegration of values in the years of restored hard-line Communist policy, called ‘normalization’, which was implemented shortly after the Soviet-led intervention of August 1968, and the contradictions between official proclamations and everyday lives. Sometimes he ironizes not very happy sides of life in those years (Dining and Sleeping Cars, Jižní Město, and Reception). Elsewhere he intensifies the situation by using harsh flash and by bringing out inherent humour (New Year’s Eve in the Hotel Jalta and Cottagers). Later, he captured the anti-régime demonstrations and changes of November 1989 and the withdrawal of the Soviet Army from Czechoslovakia. Only with the departure of the occupying forces did the Eighties come to a definitive end.

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