PhotoBooks Czech Republic

A new generation of Czech and Slovak photographers--heirs to the legacy of such modern masters as Josef Sudek and Frantisek Driktol--will be the subject of the August 1998 issue of Aperture, featuring images never before published in the West. In the Aperture tradition of investigating the contemporary photography of individual nations, Crossing Borders probes the cultural, social, and emotional climate of the post-Communist era as experienced by twenty-three photographers.

The writings of such prominent Czech and Slovak writers as the novelist Jan Novak, author of The Willys Dream Kit, and the poet Anna Ondrejkov help to illuminate the full dimensions of contemporary creative life in the Czech and Slovak Republics.

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For almost 30 years, Swiss photographer Iren Stehli followed the life of Libuna, a gypsy living in Prague, and her family. This book is a moving long-term study, a precise and close look at a life on the margins of Eastern European society under Communism and after the Velvet Revolution. It's a saga of love, tenderness, and pain, a testimony to Libuna's indomitable strength and lust for life. Not only an innovative and sensitive chronicle of the ups and downs of a woman's life, the rich details of the images in Libuna outline a history of everyday life and popular culture in the former Eastern Block. At the same time, pictures and captions represent an exploration of photography's possibilities and the ways in which it can preserve the intensities of the lived moment. Libuna is striking proof that photography's secret is neither sensationalism nor the concoction of flashy phantasmagorias, but the patient and humble search for images that transform glimpses of the world into small epiphanies, refractions of the world's ineffable truth.

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