War Photographers 1914-1918

Photographical exhibition at Prague Castle.

I was enjoying pneumonia for several weeks now, and it was really a striking experience, since my lungs are even normally functional only for 30%. I also changed my job and therefore I didn’t have enough energy or time to write. It might be better now.

I  had visited a photo exhibition named War Photographers 1914-1918 in the Theresian Wing of Prague Castle just before I became ill. This exhibition follows after the exhibition Walk the First World War, which took place at the same place two years earlier.

The photographs are the main part of this exhibition, but there are also some personal artefacts of the four photographers. These soldier photographers are Jenda Rajman, Karel Neubert, Jan Myšička and Gustav Brož. None of them was an official military photographer, they  were soldiers, and therefore the pictures they took are propaganda-free . They capture the war from their point of view, the point of view of ordinary soldiers.

It isn’t any artistic exhibition, it is a relatively crude personal document. Four documents created by men who brought their own cameras to the war and captured their own lives in the field. Lot of the pictures is on the level of pictures from cell phone cameras, however, some of them are very good both on the content and the craft side. In fact I’d like to hang some of them on the wall in my home.

Generally, I can recommend this exhibition to anybody who is interested in documents or First World War. Perhaps some of the more sensitive individuals might like to avoid this exhibition, war is cruel and some of the photographs clearly show it. I must ask those who can’t read in Czech to be indulgent, someone probably forgot to pay for a corrector, or didn’t think it necessary to check all the texts.

By the way, if you need to lose twenty pounds, get pneumonia, cough a lot, get you esophagus torn – and I can guarantee, you will be very happy to consume at least some warm water and even that will hurt so much, that you will try to avoid it.