Jindřich Štýrský & Jindřich Heisler - Na jehlách těchto dní (On the Needles of These Days), Fr. Borovy, 1945, Praha
Softcover with glassine jacket. Cover design and typography by Karel Teige. Photos by Jindřich Štýrský, text by Jindřich Heisler.
"In the mid-1930s Jindrich Styrsky made several photographic series that showed the clear influence of Eugène Atget, not so much in terms of subject mat-ter, but of mood. Atget had made a major impact on Czech photography, especially the Surrealists, his underlying melancholy apparently appealing strongly to the Czech temperament. ...
Styrsky's pictures are of peeling facades, mannequins in shop windows, a mask, tairground signs, street objects - the familiar iconography of 1930s Surrealist photography - but his square yet subtly off-kilter vision invests them with a brooding, almost manic disquiet. Unlike Atget's photographs of similar subject matter, which are calmly meditative, Styrsky's images exhibit an enervating neurosis that signifies death and decay in a clearly melodramatic manner. But the melo-drama, and even the rather too obvious final sequence of children's coffins, a cemetery and a shattered, upside-down cross, which accompanies Heisler's repeated exhortation to rebellion, fails to dent either Styrsky's authority or his pictures power. The same observation might be made of Heisler's rambling hallucinatory text, which has little to do with the pictures - but that is frequently the nature of Surrealist image/text collab-orations. This remains a haunting photobook, 50 years after the war. It is a prime example of one of the photo-books great truths - it's not necessarily the individual pictures that count, but what you do with them." (Parr and Badger, The Photobook, A History, Vol. 1)
Pages: 64
Place: Praha
Year: 1945
Publisher: Fr. Borovy
Size: 15 x 21 cm (approx.)
Softcover with glassine jacket. Cover design and typography by Karel Teige. Photos by Jindřich Štýrský, text by Jindřich Heisler.
"In the mid-1930s Jindrich Styrsky made several photographic series that showed the clear influence of Eugène Atget, not so much in terms of subject mat-ter, but of mood. Atget had made a major impact on Czech photography, especially the Surrealists, his underlying melancholy apparently appealing strongly to the Czech temperament. ...
Styrsky's pictures are of peeling facades, mannequins in shop windows, a mask, tairground signs, street objects - the familiar iconography of 1930s Surrealist photography - but his square yet subtly off-kilter vision invests them with a brooding, almost manic disquiet. Unlike Atget's photographs of similar subject matter, which are calmly meditative, Styrsky's images exhibit an enervating neurosis that signifies death and decay in a clearly melodramatic manner. But the melo-drama, and even the rather too obvious final sequence of children's coffins, a cemetery and a shattered, upside-down cross, which accompanies Heisler's repeated exhortation to rebellion, fails to dent either Styrsky's authority or his pictures power. The same observation might be made of Heisler's rambling hallucinatory text, which has little to do with the pictures - but that is frequently the nature of Surrealist image/text collab-orations. This remains a haunting photobook, 50 years after the war. It is a prime example of one of the photo-books great truths - it's not necessarily the individual pictures that count, but what you do with them." (Parr and Badger, The Photobook, A History, Vol. 1)
Pages: 64
Place: Praha
Year: 1945
Publisher: Fr. Borovy
Size: 15 x 21 cm (approx.)
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