Štreit, Jindřich

Jindřich Štreit (* 1946 Vsetín)

Arnoltice, 1985

black and white photopgraph, 310×404 mm, Olomouc Museum of Art, inv. no. F 4184

Jindřich Štreit has been taking documentary photographs of country life since the 1970s (Vesnice je svět/Countryside is the World). After completing his studies at the Faculty of Education at Palacký University, he taught in primary schools (Rýmařov, Sovinec, Jiříkov), where he organized cultural events. During the years of normalization, thanks to his personal initiative, the old school building in Sovinec, where he lived with his wife Agnes, became a retreat for many artists to carry out their informal art activities. Štreit himself attended many unofficial meetings of artists throughout the country, for which he was even imprisoned. As a photographer, he always documented the same topics - everyday human rituals and events, and the more or less changing anonymous human lives. Weddings, funerals, pig-slaughterings as well as elections, meetings and voluntary work become more than a simple snapshot in his presentations. Štreit brings an intimate, yet obvious and easily readable image of human life, whether seen in the former Sudetenland or Brittany, Japan or Siberia.

Štěpánka Bieleszová