Fotograf Magazine

Pavel Hečko ranks among the exceptional figures in Czech photography. His work from the 1980’s deserves special attention. It is in its own way paradoxical due to the minimal amount of existing texts and articles related to the artist’s work. To state that Hečko’s work stands out in the context of Czech photography is just a partial explanation; witnesses to the period of the 1960s, for example, recall that he purposely stayed on the side-lines. It’s surprising that in her numerous texts the theoretician Anna Fárová never even mentioned him; he was never a member of the Prague dramatic club (Činoherní klub), nor any other semi-official groups. On a general level Hečko shares the fate of a generation of young artists born in the 1950s, one that “did not want to take part in the construction of official Czechoslovak post-normalisation artistic culture and which simply felt a need for generational self-mutilation and communication with the public.”