INDUSTRIA (Czech Republic, 2006)
In what is today the Czech Republic, as in so many former Eastern Bloc countries, heavy industry was emphatically present in modern history as an icon of socialist progress. Václav Jirásek asks what can still be found of it in the post-communist era. He focuses particularly on firms from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s that are still operating. Often they are balancing on the edge of bankruptcy, or are just at the point of being modernized. Jirásek photographed the architecture, which is entirely in the service of functionalism and derives a certain beauty from that fact. He also did portraits of the workers who, marked by heavy labor, almost blend in with their daily work environment.
