Jiří Šigut

"There is one more thing that I cannot confirm that it happened, but it was allegedly also addressed by a party committee. Apparently there was a discussion of canceling the exhibition, but also of whether anyone would be able to exhibit black photographs taken with a cover or blurred photos. I take it as a story that came to me over time. One of the things on display was my photo of Great October Square. I didn't take it politically at all. I didn't care about October at all. It was a photo of a square. And because I worked with long exposures, I wanted to photograph it in its entirety. In all publications and guides, the square is recorded in parts. First one, second, third and finally fourth. As part of working with a long time, I decided to turn the whole camera by three hundred and sixty and have the whole scene in a single frame. The result is all black and there is a white overexposed bar in the middle caused by a single light source. At a local party meeting, the statement was allegedly made: "It is not possible for such a young person to see the building of communism that dark."

"Mrs. Jaroslava Veselá was in Přívoz, taking large-scale photographs at trade fairs. I called her and said I would need meter enlargements of my negatives. She asked me how many I wanted, and I said about thirty. We normally agreed. Everything was fine until she saw the negatives. At first she thought I was completely crazy. Of course, she didn't want to do the job. She told me that if she puts an empty negative there, there would be nothing in that photo. I told her that she should clean it first and proceed professionally. She objected to me by saying that she didn't even have to put it under the magnifier and the result would be exactly the same. After two days of persuasion and some bottles of Becherovka, I convinced her to develop the meter-large photos for me. But the main thing was that I gave her a deposit. As a professional, she would throw away all the negatives. Immediately."

"When the masters chose us from the individual operations after we finalized our apprenticeship, I thought for a while that I would stay alone. In the end, however, I found out that I was placed in my position in advance. I had manual skills and my results at the school were also good. Politics suddenly stopped playing any important role and I started going to a closed section, which had its own entry gate to the company. We worked there with machines from abroad. When one of them broke down, a technician from West Germany had to come in. At that moment, we had to cover all things in the workshop and leave a free aisle to pass to the machine. It was humorous, mainly because components for tanks were made there. The operation was called 28 BH, which was a brand of armor. All types of steel have their own codes indicating their properties. Due to its secrecy, it was marked with the letters BH in a non-standard way."