“Prague 1987” is the photographic story of a trip to a city with a very different face than the one revealed today. The book is a document published a few years before the Velvet Revolution and the division between the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The photographs illustrate the daily life in the Czechoslovakian capital in full socialist realism, with all its rules and contradictions. The protagonists of this photographic journey are a group of friends who left for Prague aiming to visit its beauties, full of expectations and looking for a thrill. But, even though disappointing these expectations, the impact with the reality reveals a new and unimaginable world. The huge difference between Prague and the cities on the other side of the curtain was mainly the silence in which its streets, people and public places were immersed in. The shops are open but empty, the order and discipline, sometimes leading to parody moments seem to reign everywhere, along with the obsession for control that occurs in a de facto militarized country.
Praha 1987,
Alberto Panciroli,
Independently publisher, 2019
42 p.
