Price: 25 lei

After the Soviet invasion of Prague, a young female photographer strives to breakfree from the constraints of Czechoslovakian normalization and embarks on
a wild journey towards freedom, capturing her experiences through thousands
of photographs.

From the darkness come flashes of bright light, followed by fragments of black-and-white images that appear in quick succession. An invitation to a prestigious photography exhibition means that seventy-year-old Libuše Jarcovjáková has to turn on her photo scanner. She has been waiting for such an invitation for the last 50 years. All that time, she’s been trying to be a recognized photographer, but no one really cared. Now, she has to choose photographs that represent her and her work. But what should she show the world? Who is she, really?

The story of Libuše begins in normalization-era Prague, when she sets off, with her camera around her neck, on a journey through “islands of freedom.” She heads off into the night streets of the communist capital city for a night shift in a printing house, to spit-and-sawdust pubs, to communities of Roma people, and the newly-arrived Vietnamese and Cubans… Snapshots of nudity, sex, and alcohol, but also boredom and the straitjacket of normalization. Her personal journey of emancipation and her search for her own sexual identity, captured through thousands of analog images, is interrupted by a murder. As the Czechoslovakian police take an interest in her photographs from the semi-legal gay T-club, Libuše decides to enter into a fake marriage and moves to Berlin.

The new world is full of obstacles. After a car accident, Libuše ends up in a hospital with a broken leg. Once she recovers, she uses her last bit of money to fly to Tokyo, where, with the help of her friend, she miraculously breaks through as a fashion photographer. But it’s not the life she wants to live. Libuše returns to Berlin, and after the fall of the Iron Curtain, heads back to Prague.

Meanwhile, she keeps a record of her everyday struggles, identity exploration, corporeality, relationships, and emotions in her pictures and journals. The result is tens of thousands of negatives, preserving the transformation of body and soul over decades.

What is Libuše looking for beyond the mirror?

“We tell the story of Libuše Jarcovjáková conceptually only through her raw photograph. The uniqueness of Libuše’s pictures does not only lie in the quality of isolated, individual shots and single moments. The impressiveness of her photographs is based on quantity, seriality, compact sequences capturing time, transformation, and even a micro-story of a situation similar to a comic strip.” – Klára Tasovská