Village People is a set of photographs taken in the western half of Czechoslovakia between 1965 and the end of Communist rule in 1990. As a selection of work by Jindřich Štreit, they offer an absorbing introduction to a gifted photographer who is little known outside of the Czech Republic. His camera might seem to be adopting a fly-on-the-wall perspective, resolutely unlyrical, but the style is not of the dispassionate, documentary kind. The landscape of his pictures, embracing muted lighting that gives the impression of a perpetual winter, all leaden skies and muddy earth, becomes a load-bearing bridge between a human and a political habitat.
