Prague 1968: Spatiality and the Tactics of Resistance

Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 53, No. 2, Summer 2011© 2011 by the University of Texas Press, PO Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713–7819 Prague 1968: Spatiality and the Tactics of Resistance Julia Friday In a review written for the Czech-English literature and art magazine Hurontaria, Jan B. Hurych discusses the oeuvre of Pavel Štecha, an internationally acclaimed Czech photographer and a former lecturer at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.1 Štecha is most recognized for his photographs of the 1968 Warsaw Pact–supported, Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia as well as the photographs of the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the events of which culminated in the overthrow of the Czechoslovak Communist government. Hurych opens his review with the following statement: In our life, we live through various moments: happy or sad, personal or social. Sometimes those are short periods of time, maybe even seconds that come and go—and we will not see them again any more. Those are the moments most convenient for snapshots and we call those photos documentary photography. Then there are photographs which are documentary as well as artistic. They are not only “documenting” but also analyzing those moments or scenes and highlighting all that is complementary and important. The artist is not only concerned with “recording,” but also with creating the atmosphere , the situation. He penetrates the very soul of people and the situations he is capturing.2 According to Hurych, the documentary photograph or “snapshot” follows a two-part typology: it serves to document an existing circumstance, and it has a potential to be conceived as a work of art. In Hurych’s model, the snapshot could be defined as artistic only if the photographer highlights elements that are “complementary” and “important.” Hence, the intrinsic quality of the artistic photograph lies in the photographer’s ability not only to record time and place but also to encapsulate and denote the environment , or, as Hurych puts it, capture the “atmosphere” of the instant. How Hurych’s definition translates into the reading of Štecha’s photographs in more concrete terms is, sadly, missing from the review. Julia Friday 160 Nevertheless, Hurych’s characterization of documentary photography as an objective record as well as an exposition of intuitive truth warrants closer examination. Such assumption glosses over the documentary photographs ’ purpose and investment in constructing meaningful narratives of history. Hurych’s model also disregards the photographs’ material and conceptual limitations. The conditions under which documentary photographs produce meaning cannot be taken for granted, especially considering the ideological and institutional investments in their function as evidence. Due to their position within networks of power, documentary photographs reproduce and legitimize these relations as they are selected, used and circulated, censored and banned, read and consumed. They are significant not only because of their potential to arrest a moment but also because they record it for specific purpose. Furthermore, Hurych’s distinction between the objective documentary practice and subjective artistic process is deeply flawed. There is no such thing as an objective representation; images are fully over-determined by the structures that give rise to their conditions of possibility. The truth, to which the documentary photographer is claimed to have access is, in Hurych’s account , positioned as both ahistorical and transcendental; the photographer as the subject-presumed-to-know subsequently transforms a moment into the veritable language of the photographic snapshot. My engagement with the photography from the period of the Warsaw Pact–supported, Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 begins with a note of caution concerning traditional conceptions of the documentary photography genre and its presumed objectivity. My wariness is all the more justified since the genre of journalistic photography, which figures at the center of the following analysis, rests on similar unexamined assumptions concerning representation. I am interested in the photographs of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, specifically those taken in the city of Prague that appeared in the widely disseminated mainstream periodicals as well as the photographs that circulated underground through series of self-publications, dissident presses, and leaflets distributed at the time and immediately following the invasion. However, rather than focusing on the problematic of the documentary or journalistic photographs as records...