Czech Interwar Photography between Art, Society and Politics

Abstract

Interwar Czech photography in the cultural spectre from the viewpoint of media and technology is related with penetration to various areas without intentionally directed nature of genres or styles. Viewed in a context with the phenomena of new mass media, industrialization, leisure time and general cultural and sociological relations in the spatio-temporal compression of modernity, photography plays a major role in forming modern culture in the 1920’s and 1930’s, in the “golden era of photography”. I have focused on the tendencies of photographic expression, influence and thinking after World War I. I considered it is important to point to reversed flow of ideas, i.e. from other fields of human activity towards photography, when this concerns tools where the development of new photographic was projected back to artistic and general social levels.