Abstract

The article aims at showing and analyzing two photographic cycles depicting the living conditions of people in late and post-socialist countries from the 1960s to the 2000s. The first is Viktor Kolařʼs photo cycle Banik Ostrava (Miner Ostrava), which was published in 1986 and in which life in the Czechoslovak industrial city of Ostrava, shaped by coal mining and steel works, is documented in photographs. The other is Karel Cudlinʼs photo book Cestou na vychod (On the way to the East), which was published in 2008 and, in addition to the photographs, also contains short texts by Jachym Topol. Cudlinʼs photographs were taken during his travels, which took him to Poland, Ukraine, Russia and even Mongolia. Cudlinʼs photo book also raises questions about what actually characterizes the East and what it means to be Eastern European. The article is intended to show that the two photographic cycles on the one hand refuse the means of representation prescribed by socialist realism and on the other hand stand in the tradition of so-called humanistic photography. The photographs deal critically with the existing living conditions, while at the same time expressing an almost emphatic relationship between the photographer and the human being.