Jindřich Marco
Following a show trial and seven years' forced labour in uranium mines, Marco turned to safer subject-matter, particularly items in museum collections, eventually writing numismatic books himself.
[1]: 7–8 He graduated from the grammar school in 1940, and had intended to study literature at Charles University, a plan made impossible when the Nazi occupation closed all Czech-language institutions of higher education.
After five days spent crossing territory occupied by both the Red Army and the Wehrmacht, Marco's group of released internees reached Częstochowa (Poland), which was full of refugees, escaped prisoners of war, and other uprooted people.
[1]: 12 Thus little survived; though in some that did, Marco "has applied his sense of dramatic composition and sometimes even absurd juxtaposition of various motifs, which intensify the symbolism of the image of wartime devastation and the return of ordinary life".
His photography of people carrying all their belongings or searching through rubble was made more difficult both by a shortage of materials – "He resolved that before pressing the shutter release he would count to ten to be sure that he felt the photo was worth taking" – and by the need to protect himself from onlookers who might be former SS or Gestapo members or otherwise dangerous.
Vladimír Birgus [cs] writes that Marco "had a feel for eloquent detail and for the juxtaposition of various motifs, [helping] to make many of his photos not only straightforward descriptions of reality but also images with more symbolic hidden meanings"; but "[i]t must be admitted .
that a number of Marco's photographs repeat the same topic, that countless times they include the dramatic juxtaposition of pedestrians against a background of ruined buildings, which gradually becomes a pictorial cliché.
"[1]: 14–16 Marco made a fleeting visit to Prague, developing his negatives and passing them to the staff of Svět v obrazech, and then going to West Berlin, where he took more photographs of life amid devastation.
[1]: 19 While in Prague in Spring of 1946 Marco met an English journalist, Hugh Andrews, who both guided him in the creation of publishable photo-essays and found him work in INP (International News Photos) and, a little later, Black Star.
By the end of the year, his photographs had appeared in British, American, French, Hungarian, Swedish and Swiss periodicals; and he was a correspondent for Black Star and thereby possessed a passport and was assured a supply of Kodak film.
During the year, Marco and Andrews went to Hungary in order to document the lives of the Slovak minority in the rural area of Mátraszentimre, though not before continuing to photograph Budapest's black markets, now in the throes of hyperinflation.
[2] Back in Prague, Marco and Andrews started work on their plan to produce picture books similar to those of the "Orbis Terrarum" series of Martin Hürlimann's company Atlantis [de].
Marco photographed in London for three weeks, notably a series in the Sunday market of Petticoat Lane, Spitalfields: in Birgus's appraisal, "a superb set of photos full of dynamics and special atmosphere".
[1]: 20–21 [Marco] produced not only a rich panorama of landscape and city images, but combined them with narrative shots of characteristic English behaviour to create an impression of intimate contact with the country and its people.
[2][5]: 127–128, 366 Vladimír Birgus and Jan Mlčoch [cs] say of this "large series of photographs" that: To extraordinary emotional effect, [Marco] captured the strength of people who, after all the horrors, devastation, and impoverishment they had experienced, did not, even amidst the ruins, lose hope in the restoration of a normal order and traditional values.
[5]: 127 In his efforts to capture symbols of war barbarism aside from fighting, Marco resembled such photographers as Robert Capa, Margaret Bourke-White, Leonard McCombe, Werner Bischof, and Yevgeny Khaldei.
[6] Marco's depiction of the period immediately following the war "constitutes one of the most important bodies of works of Czech documentary photography"; and in Birgus's opinion the quality of these photographs made them stand up to those by the much more famous Robert Capa when exhibited alongside his in Berlin in 1997.
[8]The photograph has been described as a good use of "historical incongruencies";[9] as a "striking example of an image with multiple and contradictory semantic layers";[10] and as both linking to the past and suggesting that wartime destruction has rendered a return impossible.
[5]: 128 Birgus describes his photography there as less dramatic than that of the Life photographers John Phillips and Frank Scherschel [de; he], and for the most part lacking the artistic flair of Robert Capa's; but at its best in his depictions of mothers with their small children.
[1]: 27 [d] Having supplied a foreign press agency with an irreverent photograph of President Klement Gottwald,[12] he was, just a few days later on 14 June, convicted in a show trial for having "aided and abetted defections" and given a ten-year sentence without parole;[1]: 27 [5]: 128 [13] he was forced to work in the Jáchymov uranium mines.
But Marco was not obviously involved in any of these trends, instead working for the German-language magazine Im Herzen Europas (In the heart of Europe), and from 1958 to 1963 in the editorial office of the English-language Czechoslovak Life, specializing in nature, cultural events, and portraits of Czech artists.
[1]: 28 [2] Marco also continued with photography that had no commercial application, making "a number of artistically stylized photographs of architecture and absolutely ordinary things, in which he often uses striking crops, contre-jour, silhouettes, and sharp contrasts of black and white"; and "[h]is interest in Surrealism is reflected particularly in the details of photos from cemeteries, which loosely follow on from the works of Jindřich Štyrský, Jaromír Funke, and Vilém Kříž".
