Libuše Jarcovjáková is one of the most important Czech photographers. In addition to her freelance work, she has for many years been a teacher. Since 1992, she has lectured at the College of Graphics in Prague in the sphere of applied photography and media. She was influenced not only by her artistically inclined family – her father Vladimír Jarcovják was an academic painter, and her mother Marie Jančová a painter – but also by a family friend, the film director Ester Krumbachová. She spent her childhood in artistic society. Her father was a member of the Trasa group, and so she was often in contact with the Válov sisters and Čestmír Kafka. What’s more, she lived in two streets in Prague 1, Vojtěšská and Ostrovní, which were populated with eccentric characters. It was probably here that a certain fascination with this strange, inverted world was born.
Jarcovjáková’s first encounter with a camera was when she was eight years old, when she received a Pionýr model for Christmas. Later she joined a photography club in Ostrovní Street. The influence of her father led her to decide to study not painting, but to attend the Secondary Industrial School of Graphic Arts in Prague. After graduating, she made several unsuccessful attempts to gain admission to university. Upon completing her secondary school education, she applied in 1971 to study cultural theory at the University of Olomouc and photography at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU). She was rejected not only because of her relatively bold works, but above all because of her family’s poor “cadre” profile.
So she decided to become a worker at the Svoboda gravure printing company in Smíchov, where she was an employee from 1972 to 1976. She says of that time that she wanted to develop her profile. During this period, she created her first photographic series, in which she documented the environment of the night-shift workers she worked with. These were people on the fringes of society, outside its temporal biorhythms, often alcoholics. This environment became both inspiring and self-destructive. In 1976, she was admitted to FAMU on her third attempt, where she studied until 1982. From the second half of the 1970s onwards, she photographed various national and other minorities in what was then Czechoslovakia – Vietnamese, Cuban, Roma – as well as the gay and transsexual communities in the Prague clubs T-Klub and U Voka. From the 1980s onwards, she taught Czech to the Vietnamese (the gastarbeiter community) and established close friendships with them. The same was true of the Roma community, which she visited in Eastern Slovakia. She was also involved in the volunteer movement alongside the dissident Zdeněk Pinc, with whom she organised summer camps.
In 1978, she travelled to Japan to take photographs (and made further trips in 1986 and 1999). Upon her return to Czechoslovakia, her passport was confiscated since her trip had lasted 60 days rather than the planned sixteen, and this led to her decision to emigrate. With the help of a fake marriage, in 1985 she moved to West Berlin, where she spent the next five years in the Turkish district of Kreuzberg. Even during what was a difficult period, during which she worked as a maid at the Intercontinental Hotel, for example, she continued to take photographs.
In 1986, she paid another breakthrough trip to Japan, during which she created her first professional photographs outside the Soviet bloc. She worked on commission and took commercial photographs for the brand Comme des Garçons. Feeling a certain homesickness for Europe and lacking experience in the commercial side of photography, she decided to return to Berlin. “From a situation in which I was taking photos for the most prestigious magazines in Japan, I was happy to be able to clean apartments again.”[1]
In 1990, Jarcovjáková returned to Czechoslovakia and in 1992 she began teaching, an activity that lasted almost twenty years. Students under her supervision won first prize in the Sinar Calendar 1995 international photography school competition. She also organised workshops and exhibitions. These include Transfuze I in New York (2015), Černé roky / Schwarze Jahre / Black Years – Berliner Tagebücher 1985–1990 at the Czech Centre in Berlin (2018) and Evokativ, Église Sainte-Anne in Arles in 2019.
Jarcovjáková’s work is timeless. She creates unique cycles that represent a kind of rebirth of humanist photography, while her creative activity also takes in writing diaries. Just as her photographs record the complex, intimate and deep processes of the human soul, her diary entries are also a document of the most intimate moments of life, as well as of the surrounding environment. She often presents herself through self-portrait, something that was rare in the communist era. Her own nudes are highly original, understated, direct and raw. Jarcovjáková’s work is often compared to that of the photographer Nan Goldin, a relevant analogy that is in itself proof not only of the timelessness referred to above, but also of the international reach of her work. In the sphere of Czechoslovak photography, Jarcovjáková could be viewed in parallel with the art of the Slovak New Wave.
It is clear that for Jarcovjáková, complete creative freedom is hugely important, along with an emphasis on the equal status of both photographer and photographed and the honesty with which she approaches all her models, including herself. Moreover, her self-portraits function as a kind of exploration of other levels of the soul. She breaks down the established notions of what a “beautiful” photograph should look like. She gazes into the inner life of specific people, objects and phenomena, and she has never taken such an interest in the purely formal side of things, e.g. whether she “looks good”, as it were, in her photographs. This approach has rendered her an outsider since her studies at FAMU. Her work features a unique style, which she has created and consolidated while taking photographs and which has never been contaminated by commercial work or commissions, nor by the desire to please anyone.
As far back as her studies at FAMU, Jarcovjáková presents a distinctive composition, a targeted optical blurriness and a desire to pursue her subject to the very core. Her fascination with ornament is also worthy of observation. For example, in the 1984 photograph Muž s hadem / Man with a Snake, we see a similar checkering on the snake’s skin, on the curtains, on the man’s socks and on the carpet. Moreover, her work is also characterised by a certain emotional multi-layered quality. In the first layer there is complete sovereignty and a desire for truthful communication and documentation, while the next layer mirrors her personal feelings regarding a specific situation that she has also experienced. The last level is for the viewer, namely, the possibility of an individual experience of each moment captured by the lens, which may in certain cases be condemned or misunderstood, but which can also lead to a glimpse into a preserved, suspended story, and at the same time to the experience of one’s own narrative.
[1] Secondary Archive – Libuše Jarcovjáková, https://secondaryarchive.org/artists/libuse-jarcovjakova/, accessed 20 September 2023.
