Photography Without Borders

Photo © Josh Jones / Photography Without Borders 2010

See more photos in the Holga gallery.

Photo © Josh Jones / Photography Without Borders 2010

See more photos in the Holga gallery.

Photo © Josh Jones / Photography Without Borders 2010

Model: Day. Taken with fisheye lens on Canon EOS 5.

See more photos of the model.

Photo © Josh Jones / Photography Without Borders 2010

See more photos in the Holga gallery.

Photo © Josh Jones / Photography Without Borders 2010

See more photos in the Holga gallery.

Photo © Josh Jones / Photography Without Borders 2010

See more photos in the Holga gallery.

Photo © Josh Jones / Photography Without Borders 2010

See more photos in the Holga gallery.

Photo © Josh Jones / Photography Without Borders 2010

See more photos in the Holga gallery.

Photo © Josh Jones / Photography Without Borders 2010

Model: Day.

See more in the photo gallery Beautiful Women.

Photo © Josh Jones / Photography Without Borders 2010

Model: Day.

See more in the photo gallery Beautiful Women.

They scare me, and so they should.

Monument to the Victims of a Totalitarian Regime, Prague, Czech Republic. This man stoops and stares at you from a desperately sloping staircase, identical forms of him slowly eroding as they recede into the distance – until the last few steps are empty.

It is so easily to go to bustling tourist-filled city like Prague and just think of key spots like Wenceslas Square as ugly, tacky tourist traps, filled with MacDonalds and avoidable at all costs. But once you’ve been to the Communist Museum, or done a little research yourself, your image of the city is changed irrevocably. To see not thousands but hundreds of thousands of people, not shopping but running across Wenceslas Square as a huge black-and-yellow mass of policeman hound them and beat them to the ground – to see this and a hundred other moments, caught on film from apartment windows or sneaked away by daring journalists – is to completely destroy your image of an apparently crass and commercial metropolis.

Eastern Europe is used by British and other tourists as a drinking hole, and even a sex hole, and often considered dirty and uncivilised by those who have not been there. But this is a land of people who have not only endured the suffering of a brutal communist regime, but have actually fought out against it and risked their lives in the process – by keeping faiths and traditions deemed illegal, by escaping with their family into the free world, and by showing their will in mass demonstrations, decade upon decade.

It is not fancy ideals or clever politics that kept the Communists in power all this time, but brute military slaughter and constant police intimidation. You can see this from film footage and learn it in history lessons, but the best way is to ask people. Just sit and talk to someone about their life and you will realise there is another world, a world dead but still remembered, that they have been free from for barely fifteen years now.

I spoke to a lady whose pension we stayed in up in the Mala Fatra mountains. She’d lived in Slovakia all her life, and her strong family had shielded her from most of the Communist indoctrination. But in the eighties, when her little boy started going to school and coming back with fears and terrors she felt no child should have to feel, she decided to flee with her children to the West. Knowledge of her plans could have got anyone else into trouble with the Police, so she told her parents and friends that the family were going on holiday.

So our hostess and her children had to pack their bags as if for a holiday, and got a vista to visit Yugoslavia. With the help of the UN they fled from there to the West, with nothing but what they could fit in a suitcase, their savings now worthless. They could not communicate with friends or family in Slovakia, for fear of their safety, until the fall of the USSR.

She’s strong, and happy now, having made a safe world for herself and her family in the US, and they returned to Slovakia last Winter and set up the beautiful pension where we stayed. If you’re ever in Slovakia let me give you their email, they are wonderful people.

This is a very powerful monument, and I hope I’ve captured a little of the horror it represents. But most of all I implore you to go to visit Eastern Europe if you have not done so already, and find out for yourself how grateful people are to be free from totalitarian rule.

Shot on Ilford XP2 with Canon EOS 5. Photo and text © Josh Jones / Photography Without Borders 2006.