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Involvement with the photographic subject is an emblematic tenet of documentary photography. A fundamental desire to make a statement justifies that this involvement often becomes the photographer’s personal journey into self-discovery. This journey sees, albeit paradoxically, the coexistence of personal emotions in all their subjectivity along with the ethical and technical objectivity which further describes documentary photography. These are the principles that inform “Ostrava” by Michal Honkys, where the author’s photographic statement is the result of a symbiotic coexistence between his desire to remain as objective as possible in a journey that speaks of political, social and emotional mutability.
Ostrava is Honkys’ birthplace, a city

nestled in the Beskydy mountain range of what used to be known as Czechoslovakia for several decades of communist rule. As a former inhabitant, Honkys witnessed the underlying decline behind the illusory promises of prosperity postulated by the communist regime and its oppressive propaganda. The extent of such decline was vast, for it translated into palpable environmental degradation of urban and rural areas, as much as into the often unspoken resentment of the Ostravans towards an increasingly unsustainable system. However, subsequent political u-turns did not totally eradicate the Ostravan’s deeply embedded scepticism towards future welfare. The very remnants of a past that had gone wrong still lied scattered across the newly built grounds to an

incipient prosperity. Thus, Ostrava and its hinterland are to be considered testimonial grounds of a substantial mutation that it is not technically metamorphic in nature; there has not been an absolute change, but a transformation which bears the traceable residue of what the Ostravans have left unvoiced, untold, silently standing upright at present time.
It is precisely by means of his photographs that Michal Honkys disturbs this silencing of the past, bringing into expression the ambiguous relation between it and the present, between bygone decadence and present thrift, the old and new, life and death. He presents us with a series of images that are loaded with juxtapositions of symbols from past and present, subtly enunciating the very

incongruity that underlies human existence. Like a visual series of instances of the ironic, “Ostrava” is a journey through newly verdant forests crisscrossed by green-coloured pipelines meant to merge harmonically with the environment. The journey continues through rural and urban spaces often laden with rubble and hips of materials which taunt our perception in our attempt to establish whether construction or demolition is taking place. However, the presence of homely Ostravan cottages is perhaps the greatest of ironies due to the very reason for their existence.As stated by Honkys, the country cottage became a commonplace lure under communist rule, a goal to aspire in return for hard work to the benefit of the system. The cottage would provide ephemeral