Anna Fárová

Martin Heller

Iren Stehli

Milena Hübschmannová

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.

A Gypsy's Life in Prague

Iren Stehli: Libuna

This survey of Iren Stehli's images from 1973 to 2001 captures Czech life over an intense three decades. The artist, born in Zurich in 1953, studied photography in Prague in the mid-70s. In the late 60s, her adopted country had begun to stir under the hand of communism--and been punished for it. By the middle of her career, in 1989, the embattled communist government resigned, passing power to playwright Vaclav Havel in the Velvet Revolution. The swift changes that followed have brought what is now the Czech Republic into the European Union. Stehli's human stories of that era alternate with conceptual series, both of which share a characteristic poetry and humor. The thematically arranged chapters of Iren Stehli offer a compact overview of her oeuvre, and subtle, compelling testimony to the last decades of Czechoslovakian socialism and the transformation into a free-market democracy. Her previous book is Libuna: A Gypsy's Life in Prague.

Iren Stehli

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