T-Club by Libuše Jarcovjáková was made from 1983 to 1985 inside an LGBTQ+ social club near Jungmann Square in Prague, Czechoslovakia, recording its community under state socialism.
Jarcovjáková's sustained participation turns the project toward questions of queer sociability, belonging, and visibility. Rather than treating sexuality as spectacle, she emphasized the coexistence of difference and ordinary life. T-Club offered regulars and newcomers a temporary refuge from the pressures of communist Czechoslovakia, where exposure could lead to blackmail, workplace consequences, or police attention. The photographer became part of the club's social core and described it as a family.
The photographs move through crowded celebrations, masquerade balls, New Year's Eve gatherings, and quieter stretches of fatigue and restriction. Regulars, chance visitors, friends, and Jarcovjáková herself appear amid dancing, drinking, nudity, desire, and pauses in the club's drab interiors. Black-and-white frames and direct flash sharply isolate faces, bodies, and gestures from low-lit rooms. Grain, intermittent sharpness, and compressed tonal range give the pictures a bare, immediate quality, while the alternation of exuberance and lethargy resists a uniformly celebratory mood.
The flash was both a visual method and an ethical signal. Jarcovjáková used it so people could see when she photographed and leave the frame if they wished. Access developed over months of nightly attendance, eye contact, and permission rather than covert observation. She worked with black-and-white materials that were practical to obtain and develop, and returned prints to sitters.
The photographs were first publicly exhibited at Prague's Langhans Gallery in 2008, followed by a dedicated Prague exhibition in 2019 and inclusion in Jarcovjáková's Evokativ presentation at Les Rencontres d'Arles that year. Further exhibitions included PHotoESPAÑA in Madrid in 2022, Lisbon in 2024, and Stockholm and Berlin in 2025. The National Gallery Prague incorporated the series into its 2024-25 Jarcovjáková retrospective. Untitled published the 256-page T-Club photobook in 2024. Its first 500-copy edition sold out in four months, prompting a second edition presented at Paris Photo and Polycopies.
