Let’s imagine that a friend of ours, a book designer, calls us to ask for help. He has only just begun to work on a design for a book on the history of Eastern and Central European culture under Communism. For the book’s front and back covers, he needs a pair of really striking archival shots, two haunting images that would bracket, by their mutual contrast, twentieth-century culture’s most demanding test and probably crucial experience, the seventy-odd-year-long story of Communist rule over that part of Europe. Could we suggest something?
As far as I’m concerned, for such a pair of visual brackets I would definitely recommend not the worn-out pictures of the salvo of the cruiser Aurora and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall but something much less expected: two photographs, each showing a writer who had accepted an important position within his country’s structure of power, and each capturing the moment when such a writer-turned-politician experienced the most enlightening confrontation of his ideas and dreams with the opinions and wishes of the people of his country.
The reader has probably made a guess by now that for the bracket nearer to us in time I would choose the well-known image of Václav Havel waving to enthusiastic crowds from the balcony of the Prague palace. Wrong. Havel himself is an obvious choice, but my lens catches him at another place and time. More than a year after he is elected president of Czechoslovakia, he has just
