Lost Europe
Out of 574 photographs taken over three decades by three authors (Karel Cudlín, Jan Dobrovský and Martin Wagner) Zuzana Lednická selected 139 for an imaginary story, most territorially oriented. People, animals and landscape alternate in it – and emptiness between them. For 400 ASA photographers, Ukraine is not just a geographical and cultural unit, a country on the edge, a "country where you walk on bones and goats graze on graves next to garages", a country, which have been sucked out by pogroms, famines, deportations, wars and today's twisted braindrain. Above all, it is for them a kind of pre-formulated sentimental idea of a simpler pre-industrial life (which no one wants to live anymore). While the strong and able build our western houses and dust our libraries, there are old women and children, horses, dogs and cats struggling to meet basic needs left on the photographs. The classic book design and the separation of the mental spaces of the image and the words are respected by photographs printed in three blacks on glazed paper, removed from the silver-printed texts of the journalist Petra Procházková on rough paper. The blue-violet canvas and adapters wrap everything in its own romantic-magical robe.
