Bad Boys Bad Girls Czechoslovak Documentary Photography 1958–1989 from the Collection of Prague City Gallery 7. 10. 2014 – 27. 10. 2014

Bad Boys Bad Girls – Czechoslovak Documentary Photography 1958-1989 from the Collection of Prague City Gallery.

The exhibition Bad Boys Bad Girls is named after carefree children playing at the housing estate, in a junkyard, at the beaters, but it is also about their parents who dealt with the lack of freedom under the Communist regime in their own ways, taking a stance, such as the following selected photographers: Dagmar Hochová, Jindřich Štreit, Dana Kyndrová, Jiří Hanke, Jaroslav Kučera, Pavel Štecha, Ján Rečo and Viktor Kolář.

Their artistic expression was not intentionally political and socially critical, but it seems that these issues got to the surface directly and genuinely from the environment and the people they had photographed. But it was enough for some of them to become a target of monitoring and bullying by those in power, and some even ended in prison like Jindřich Štreit. But they would not be Bad Boys Bad Girls if they put down their cameras instead.

Their black and white photographs give authentic testimony about the state of things and the spirit of that time.