Libuše Jarcovjáková
Libuše Jarcovjáková is a Czech photographer and educator who graduated from the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. Her first documentary photography series was taken at her workplace at the Svoboda Printing House, where she took pictures of people between shifts. This series played with the image of the ethics of work in a socialist country and focused on unheroic moments. Soon, however, Jarcovjáková became interested in the lives of marginal groups in their own environments as an alternative to the official patterns of a citizen of the socialist republic. She thus began
documenting the life of the Vietnamese community in Czechoslovakia, a group with which she had become involved through her teaching of Czech to foreigners. She also documented the life of Roma community in Prague and eastern Slovakia, and she repeatedly travelled to Japan to work for fashion magazines. Jarcovjáková lived in West Berlin between 1985 and 1992. Later on, she returned to Prague—where she now teaches photography at the Secondary Technical School of Graphics. She is known above all for her work on nightlife and the LGBTQIA+ community in Prague and Berlin. Between 1983 and 1985, she documented the goings-on at a gay bar in Prague called T-Club. Jarcovjáková has engaged in the practice of documenting her own everyday life since she was very young. Her archive contains many intimate self-portraits and images of people close to her. In 2016, Jarcovjáková’s written diaries and photographs from Prague, West Berlin, and Tokyo from between 1971 and 1987 were published in a book entitled “Černé Roky” (The Black Years). Furthermore, her diaries and extensive photographic archive served as the basis of the feature documentary “I’m Not Everything I Want to Be” (Dir. Klára Tasovská, 2024). D.M.
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