This summer it will be forty-one years since that memorable open-air concert in the Pezinok amphitheatre, ridiculously dubbed the Festival of Youth by Ladislav Snopko (‘Agnes’ to his friends), who after the division of Czechoslovakia served as Slovakia’s minister of culture. Jaroslav Prokop liked to photograph musicians and had already worked with many of those performing: Vladimír Mišík and his band ETC…, Marsyas, Vladimír Merta, Vlasta Třešňák, Petr Lutka, Marian Varga, Marika Gombitova and Modus, Jaroslav Hutka and jazzman Gabriel Jonáš. To call the Pezinok venue an ‘amphitheatre’ is a slight exaggeration, as is Martin Věchet’s claim that ‘his’ festival was a Slovak Woodstock. Still, it was a big event back then in Czechoslovakia, attracting lovers of rock and folk from far and wide – a crowd who could equally well be called opponents of the regime (a fact that did not escape the communist authorities), so it is a wonder the organizers were able to put it on at all, even under the obnoxious banner of the Socialist Youth League.

There the twenty-six-year-old Prokop took a large number of photographs, some of which he included in his diploma portfolio at Prague Film Academy. Looking at them now over forty years on, I am aware of a series of highly plastic images as well as other, accompanying sequences that Prokop’s camera never managed to capture. I believe that’s what good documentary-making is about: evoking memories of places you once visited, bringing back old friends and fellow-travellers on life’s journey and, at least for a moment, beating Time at his own game. It’s about recreating before our eyes the prevailing social climate of a time past, and doing so on black-and-white film without recourse to elaborate illustrative attributes. But a genuinely creative documentarist is also able to take viewers to places and countries they have never actually seen, among people they have only heard tell of (and perhaps not even that), and give them a kind of déjà vu feeling, making them wonder: Was I really never there? And if so, how is it possible? I mean, I wasn’t even born! That’s the reason (but not the only reason) why Prokop’s photographs of the Pezinok festival can so forcefully remind those of us who were there of that forgotten atmosphere of communal defiance in a hostile world and, for the rest of us, conjure up a vivid picture of what those days were like and what was at stake.

When Jaroslav Prokop and I were putting this exhibition together, our primary source was his diploma album of forty-two black-and-white photographs, which in turn had been selected from a large quantity of negative material. From those we made a further selection, leaving us with thirty-two pictures, most of them presented in the extra-large format 180 x 110 cm, which we grouped into four sections: Audience, Musicians, Backstage and Night. Both the format of the exhibits and the way they are installed can be seen as a paraphrase of Luděk Marold’s famous panoramic depiction of the Battle of Lipany – the difference being that in Prokop’s case the battle ended in victory. We who were there could not yet know that. You, who for one reason or another were not there, now have a chance to relive with us those distant emotions, hopes and dreams. 

Karel Haloun a Luděk Kubík
exhibition curators