Name Marketa Luskacova | ||
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Markéta Luskačová (b. Prague, 1944) is a Czech photographer known for her series of photographs taken in Slovakia, Britain and elsewhere. Considered one of the best Czech social photographers to date, since the 1990s she has photographed children in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and also Poland.
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Biography
In 1968 Luskačová graduated from Charles University in Prague with a thesis on religion in Slovakia. During her stay in Slovakia, she became familiar with the old Christian rites and decided to return with a camera to document the surviving traditions. Her thesis was titled Poutě na Východním Slovensku (Pilgrimages in East Slovakia). In the Pilgrimages cycle she mainly focused on the Slovak village of Šumiac. Following that she studied photography at FAMU, in this period photographing in Slovakia and Poland.
From 1970 to 1972, Luskačová photographed stage performances of the Za branou theatre, founded by director Otomar Krejča. However, the theatre was banned by communists in the spring of 1972. The same year, she was allowed to display the cycle Pilgrims in the Gallery of Visual Arts in Roudnice nad Labem (the curator of the exhibition was the photography theorist and art historian Anna Fárová). In 1971, Luskačová married the poet Franz H. Wurm (native of Prague and a British citizen). Wurm, terrified by the "Normalization" in Czechoslovakia, left the country and Luskačová asked the state authorities for permission to visit her husband abroad. After several short visits she received a form for emigration (1975) and went to live in England. However, in an interview she claimed: "Bohemia, Prague and Šumiac have never ceased to be my home. I always took my life abroad as a kind of stopgap that stretched to be a considerable part of my life."
In the 1970s and '80s, the communist censorship attempted to conceal her international reputation. Her works were banned in Czechoslovakia, and the catalogues for the exhibition Pilgrims in the Victoria and Albert Museum were lost on their way to Czechoslovakia.
Luskačová started photographing London's markets in 1974. In the markets of Portobello Road, Brixton and Spitalfields, she "[found] a vivid Dickensian staging".
In 2016 she self-published a collection of photographs of street musicians, mostly taken in the markets of east London, under the title To Remember - London Street Musicians 1975-1990 and featuring an introductiom by John Berger.