Jindrich Marco

Jindřich Marco (10 May 1921 – 20 December 2000) was a Czech photographer and numismatist. As a photographer, he is best known for documenting the state of several central European cities shortly after the Second World War, the hardships of their inhabitants, and the beginnings of reconstruction.

Following a show trial and seven years' forced labour in uranium mines, Marco turned to safer subject-matter, particularly items in museum collections, eventually writing numismatic books himself. He also created a major series of portraits of Czechoslovak artists, musicians and writers. He briefly returned to photojournalism by documenting the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Youth and wartime Marco was born Jindřich Fritsche on 10 May 1921 in Prague, to Albert Fritsche, a bank clerk, and his wife Marie, née Spitzová. For his surname, he preferred "Marco", which he used consistently for his photography, and officially adopted in 1950.

Marco received his first camera in 1931. While still at in , Prague, he managed to use his Kodak Retina to photograph teachers at unflattering moments (for example, while wiping their noses), and had these published in the magazine . Tutoring other boys allowed him to save up for and buy a Rolleiflex camera. As a photographer, Marco mainly took stills for the magazines (Cinema Review) and (The Week in Prague). and received commissions from Life (US), Lilliput and Picture Post (Britain), and Paris Match (France).

Romantic Prague Also in 1948, Dědourek published Marco's photobook Praha romantická (Romantic Prague). The photographs in this book, not yet published in any quantity elsewhere, are very unlike the deliberate and oft-published photography of Prague by Karel Plicka: while Plicka's avoid pedestrians, cars, and other ingredients that might date his photographs, Marco's does not do so; Praha romantická "paved the way for later books about Prague by Erich Einhorn, Václav Jírů, and , which celebrate not only the city but also the poetry of its inhabitants' everyday life". Vladimír Birgus and say of this "large series of photographs" that:

To extraordinary emotional effect, [Marco] captured the strength of people who, after all the horrors, devastation, and impoverishment they had experienced, did not, even amidst the ruins, lose hope in the restoration of a normal order and traditional values.

Marco's depiction of the period immediately following the war "constitutes one of the most important bodies of works of Czech documentary photography"; and in Birgus's opinion the quality of these photographs made them stand up to those by the much more famous Robert Capa when exhibited alongside his in Berlin in 1997.

Reviewing the same exhibition, Eve Tushnet wrote that:

the picture's self-consciousness allows it to suggest that photography, despite its illusion of veracity, can be used to lie, and should be regarded as no more transparent and no less suspect than any other medium.

The photograph has been described as a good use of "historical incongruencies"; as a "striking example of an image with multiple and contradictory semantic layers"; and as both linking to the past and suggesting that wartime destruction has rendered a return impossible.

Israel and socialist realism In 1948, Marco photographed in the newly established state of Israel, concentrating on the lives of the freshly arrived settlers but also photographing the Israeli military at work in the Arab–Israeli War. he was, just a few days later on 14 June, convicted in a show trial for having "aided and abetted defections" and given a ten-year sentence without parole; he was forced to work in the Jáchymov uranium mines. He was released in 1957. The work was also exhibited in Fronta Gallery in Prague; it later appeared in Bitter years: Europe, 1945–1947 (1995) and, in the Fototorst series, Jindřich Marco (2014).

In 1968 Marco made a return to photojournalism, photographing the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia; and, under the pseudonym Václav Svoboda, managing to have this work published in Vienna, Frankfurt and Zürich in a German-language book, Genosse Aggressor (Comrade aggressor). Birgus commends Marco for his bravery, but rates his photography of the invasion as not reaching that by , , or , let alone that by Josef Koudelka. A Czech-language version, Soudruh agresor, came out under Marco's name in 1990; it was "poorly printed". Osobnosti československej spoločensky zaujatej fotografie 1940–1980 (Personalities of Czechoslovak socially concerned photography 1940–1980). , Banská Bystrica, December 1986. Czechoslovak photography from 1915 to the 1960s. Jacques Baruch Gallery, Chicago. July–August 1992. 16 photographers. Sztuka czeska i słowacka XX. w. (Czech and Slovak art of the 20th century). National Museum, Wrocław, 1992. London; Berlin; Biennale of International Photography, Photographic Centre, Skopelos, 1996. Accompanied by a book. Magie české fotografie (The magic of Czech photography). , 24 October – 8 December 2008. Berlinische Galerie, Berlin. International Center of Photography, New York City.