Exhibition recalls shop windows of Communist era

0:00
/
0:00

An exhibition of photographs of Communist-era shop windows called Nakupuji, or I Shop, has just opened at Prague's Galerie Vaclava Spaly. The photos were taken in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc in the mid- to late-1980s (and Russia in 1990) and represent a vivid and informative record of their time. The man who created them, Canadian-American photographer David Hlynsky, was in town for the exhibition opening, and I asked him 'why shop windows?'

"I was born and raised in North America in a highly, overly-stimulated environment of advertising and fantasy, sexual seduction; all of my life I've lived in this extreme fantasy-land of materialism. When I came to Prague at first in 1996 and then continued to travel I found a landscape, an urban landscape, that was much more simple.

"These pictures were surprising to me. They gave me relief from the fantasy, but they also signified a very simple inventory of the kinds of products that East Bloc citizens needed, which were the same as what we needed in the West. But there was a great difference in the way they were presented, and that's what I started to notice - the difference."

What about the actual design you see in a lot of these Communist-era shop windows - it looks quite kitschy now, but do you think some of the design has value?

"I think the design certainly has artistic value and design value. The difference that I see between the East Bloc windows from that period and the shop windows that I live with in my own culture is that in the West everything is branded. By branding I mean that everything has a company...fantasy attached to it.

"In these East Bloc windows it was very different, everything was simply labelled. It was only the name of what the product was, and the fantasy was stripped away."

Was it a kind of culture shock for you coming to the Eastern Bloc and seeing shops just called, for instance, 'Meat', and having almost nothing in them?

"Yes, sure it was a culture shock. It was also a culture shock after I spent a month here and went back to the West and saw this almost obscene cornucopia of goods spilling into the street, with people not seeming to care. So the culture shock went both ways."

Did you ever feel on your travels a bit lost when you couldn't buy Western products and you were reduced to eating, I don't know, very simple food, or you couldn't buy decent razor blades?

"Well, two answers to that. One is that it's very important for people to be lost sometimes. A human being who never gets lost I think suffers greatly. You have to reduce your needs sometimes just to experience your own existence.

"But I also found if I went into Poland or into Russia, or other countries and cities, if I found people on the street they almost always could help me some way. And I discovered that many of the citizens under the Communist regimes were people who knew how to collect materials in their own apartments, and many apartments were like warehouses.

"People knew each other, they knew their neighbours and they would be able to ask the neighbour for something and the neighbour would ask another neighbour and another neighbour, and finally there would be something there."

By the way, his surname may sound Czech but Mr Hlynsky says his ancestors probably came from Slovakia and Poland.

If you'd like to see his work please go to http://photoarts.com

For more about the gallery go to www.nadace-cfu.cz