About the project

Photographer Oldřich Škácha was among Václav Havel's close associates and friends from the 1970s on. He first documented the dissent in the circle around Pavel Kohout before later in part photographing Havel’s presidency and then devoting himself fully to the final years of his life and post-presidential period. However, the scope of his photographic work is far broader, with perhaps his most famous pictures dating from August 1968. But even before that, he captured a number of artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers, visual artists and scientists of the 1960s, many of whom were forced out of public life in the wake of the Soviet occupation, and, conversely, those who gained respect during communist normalization. Škácha's collective work thus ranks among the most important sources of Czechoslovak and Czech culture of the latter half of the 20th century.

When we acquired the complete life’s work of Oldřich Škácha, including copyright, for the Václav Havel Library archive in 2015, we decided to gradually make it available to the general public. In addition to previously published photographs, we are now presenting the Gallery of Cultural Personalities as a comprehensive collection of the photographer’s work.

In order to present this work to the public, we had to go through about 100,000 images on contacts and negatives, select the most impressive, describe them and scan the positives from the film. Where it was not possible to date the images unambiguously because, for example, the photographer’s handwritten notes were at odds with other identifiers, we acknowledge this and offer at least an approximate date when they were taken.

That said, the best possible processing care would not be enough on its own. We were able to start this work in 2024 in part because in 2023 we succeeded in an application for grant No. 0343/2023 – for development of digitization, documentation and information activities in the field of visual arts and architecture – from the Czech Ministry of Culture.

After a year of work, we can now present the Gallery of Cultural Personalities in photographs by Oldřich Škácha to the public as an authentic and original source of information about modern Czechoslovak and Czech history. These are not studio portraits; the photographs were mostly taken on 35mm film in a reportage style. It should be pointed out – especially to interested parties among the younger generation – that even though the images have been digitised, they have only been cleaned up, with modifications that could have been carried out in a darkroom; it remains the case that they were taken in the era of analogue photography, and every researcher ought to treat them as such.

The project is the work of

Ondřej Němec, Václav Havel Library photographer. In the 1970s and 1980s he photographed the Czechoslovak dissent and underground. After 1989 he worked for the revived Lidové noviny and contributed to many domestic and foreign books and periodicals.

Martin Vidlák, head of the Václav Havel Library Archive. Former head of monitoring and documentation at the Press Department of the Office of the President and collaborator of Václav Havel in his private, post-presidential office.

Karolína Stránská, acting director. Worked in protocol at the Office of the President under Václav Havel, then at Czech embassies in London and Tokyo, in the team for the preparation of the Czech EU presidency at the Office of the Government, and as head of office of Minister of Defence Alexander Vondra.

Jiří Šolc, webmaster