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Jindrich Streit (Photographer)
Original Side Gallery exhibition text, 1990:
For over 20 years, primary school teacher Jindrich Streit has been photographing the people of his home village Sovinec, a tiny hamlet in the north of Czechoslovakia. The area was inhabited for centuries by Sudeten Germans and was subject to the Munich agreement in 1938. Then, after the war, all Germans were expelled from the country, leaving behind a string of empty towns and villages. Eventually, a few Czech families from other parts of the country came to settle in Sovinec and the neighbouring village of Krisov.
Streit has always lived and worked among his subjects. He is well known locally and always assumed to be carrying his camera. His photographs strikingly reveal this intimate relationship with the villagers. But his pictures are often brutally frank about the hard life being etched out by the people of Sovinec, too frank for the now discredited authorities, who in 1982 imprisoned him for, amongst other things, photographing a party meeting where people were asleep. As a result, he lost his teaching job and had to join his friends who worked on the local collective farm.
But Streit persevered with his photographic work. He also responded by opening his house to the local people and building a gallery for contemporary art on the first floor. His wife Agnes converted another room so that she could teach music to the village children. Today it is a remarkable cultural centre that attracts work from around the world, in a tiny village over 200 miles from Prague.
With attention now firmly focused on Czechoslovakia and the other eastern bloc countries, this exhibition is a timely celebration of the life and work of one of the finest living Czech photographers.