Village People by Jindřich Štreit is a long-term black-and-white chronicle of everyday life in the villages of North Moravia and Bohemia in Communist Czechoslovakia. Rooted above all in the poor Bruntál district and the small village of Sovinec, where the photographer lived and worked as a teacher and later as a dispatcher, the project unfolds across twenty-five years of social and political upheaval.
Visually, Village People relies on an unembellished, direct approach. The black-and-white images cultivate a dense, often grey atmosphere that underlines the material scarcity of interiors and streets. Štreit photographs farmers caked in soil, modest apartments with peeling paint, and public celebrations that feel at once tired and exuberant. His framing keeps the human figure central while folding in architecture, state symbols, and hand-painted signs, so that bodies and environments together describe the contradictions of rural socialism. Humorous and absurd juxtapositions introduce a tragicomic register without tipping into caricature.
Technically, the project grows from classic small-format documentary practice, with Štreit working over the years with various compact cameras and favoring fixed wide-angle lenses around 28–35mm. He generally used fast black-and-white film, often at 400 ASA and occasionally pushed, and relied on available light both outdoors and in dim interiors. In the darkroom he printed himself, mostly mid-size enlargements on glossy fiber-based paper, embracing a certain lack of refinement to preserve a sense of raw immediacy.
The project’s reception mirrors the political shifts of its time. In the early 1980s, the same unvarnished description of village life that viewers now read as sober documentation was treated by the authorities as defamation of the state, leading to Štreit’s arrest, the confiscation of his negatives, and a ban on teaching and exhibiting. After 1989, the work entered public collections and international exhibitions, and critics began to relate it to key twentieth-century strands of socially engaged photography, including the work of Josef Koudelka. The 2020 monograph Village People 1965–1990, together with the German Photo Book Prize 2021|22 (Bronze) and inclusion in exhibitions and collections at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, has further consolidated its status.
