On the Národní Třída (Avenue of the Nation) in Prague stands a
department store that opened in 1975. Until the fall of the socialist
regime it was called “Máj”: the month of May. Nowadays the fifth month
of the year is referred to in Czech as “květen”. “Máj” is an older word
that has a romantic quality and is closely associated with a famous poem
of the same name by Karel Hynek Mácha written in 1836. In 1996 the
British supermarket chain Tesco purchased the store, renaming it “My” in
2009. If this name is interpreted as an English word, then it refers to
an individual. It is surely no coincidence that this English name
sounds much the same as the old Czech one. If pronounced, however,
according to Czech phonetics, which no one ever does, it sounds quite
different. Then it means “we” and refers to a collective. Since 2017
Tesco has been selling off some of its stores in the Czech Republic
because of financial losses. In spring of 2018 the department store “My”
was also sold. Photographed in Prague from November 2015 to June 2018
Dialogues with Solitudes follows Dave Heath’s radical 1965 book A Dialogue with Solitude,
which captures the restless zeitgeist of the sixties like a protest
song. Heath depicts the fractures and unease in post-war America’s
society of abundance, before the rise of the civil rights movement and
opposition to the Vietnam War. Rather than focusing on specific scenes
or events, Heath photographs lived, intimate experience: tension in city
streets, close constrained bodies and isolated individuals who have
seemingly lost their sense of self.
Influenced by W. Eugene Smith and photographers of the Chicago School
including Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan Heath expresses above all
his presence in the world by recognizing an alter ego in others absorbed
in inner torment. To transform this experience into book form, Heath
was guided primarily by concerns of sequence, particularly in Robert
Franks The Americans and Walker Evans American Photographs.
In Heath’s words: “For me, the act of photographing is no more than
making … diaristic notes that come out of engagement with the world. It
is in my sequencing of photographs that I create poetic structure, a
connective linkage, not chronological or narrative in development such
as a photo-essay, but emotional in development.” |