People, at Home. Prague, the 1970s.

opening 27.10. 2026

guided tour: Thu 5. 11. from 6 pm – Žižkov in the 1970s (with Iren Stehli and Dušan Šimánek)

curator Pavel Vančát

Stehli looks at ordinary people, ordinary things, ordinary situations, with respect and astonishment.

The banality of her heroes, their fates and their surroundings has nothing to do with the allure of stories from life's fringes, nor with the self-absorption of stars. Her stories are simple, her photographs clear, her themes so easy, so ordinary, and yet so unusual and different.

Anna Fárová (Torst, 2006)

Few could name the specifics of Czech realities of late socialism as well as photographer Iren Stehli. While her most famous and most personal time-lapse cycle, Libuna (1974–2009), maps the life of a Romani woman and her family in Prague's Žižkov, at the opposite pole stands Pražské výlohy (from 1978 to the present), an extensive study of the unstable content of public space. Between these two poles, however, opens a multitude of other themes and spaces captured in further cycles, some of which are still almost unknown today.

Iren Stehli grew up in Zürich, Switzerland, in a bilingual environment (her mother was Czech), and from the 1960s repeatedly returned to Prague. After a brief episode of studying Slavic studies, at the beginning of the 1970s she began attending the photography department of FAMU, which at that time was an oasis of relative freedom. Her classmates there included members of the generation that, under the guidance of Anna Fárová, sought answers to the politically and aesthetically bleak situation of normalised Czechoslovakia, and which made its strongest mark in 1981 with the legendary exhibition 9&9 in Plasy, concluding earlier solo shows at the Činoherní klub in Prague. Stehli was fascinated from the start by Czech everyday life, so different from Switzerland at the time. Thanks to the studio of Dušan Šimánek and Jan Malý on Kubelíkova Street in Žižkov, which was the hub of many shared activities, Žižkov soon became her home neighbourhood. “Round the corner in Bořivojova lived tailor Sláma, and a bit further on Libuna, whom I then photographed my whole life. Gradually it snowballed, more cycles kept coming…”

One of the very first sets was Lidé (1975–1976), unassuming portraits of Žižkov residents whom she approached in front of their houses and shops. These street portraits combine informality with the safe time and space given for posing. In Plasy, Stehli showed three life-size portraits, and the rest of the cycle can be seen for the first time. Stehli later returned to give the portrayed their photographs, which led her into their flats and naturally to the complementary series Doma (1975–81). The Doma cycle, first shown at the Činoherní klub in 1978 (just as Sofia Rydet began a similar, sociologically monstrous project in Poland), already has a fully fixed frame and definition. To the people who rewarded the photographer with trust and an invitation into their private lives, Stehli grants the freedom to express their identity against the background of their own taste and desires, and in the middle of a seemingly uniformly dilapidated neighbourhood finds a colourful panorama of lifestyles and destinies. A long friendship linked Iren Stehli with her chief mentor Anna Fárová: “Aneta supported me and took an interest in me from my FAMU studies onward; it was with her and with Dušan Šimánek that I most often discussed my photographs. I also sometimes helped her sort Sudek's estate in the flat on Úvoz.” The “post-Sudek” cycle Zátiší (1975–2002) represents a kind of lifeless appendix to the earlier Žižkov sets, and at the same time, in the absurdity and incongruity of its interior constellations, it is a precursor to the later Pražské výlohy. Stehli's Žižkov photographs carry, even after five decades (!), the same lucidity, which paradoxically grows as the physical presence of their subjects recedes. Every adult photographed is today, at best, a pensioner, and the infants of the time are approaching their 50th birthdays (myself included). Yet their temperament back then, their simplicity, kindness and resignation, steeped in trust toward the young, warmly gentle photographer, can be seen through her…