The Evocative Years, Libuše Jarcovjáková’s vivid chronicle of Prague’s subcultures

Libuše Jarcovjáková lives on the fifth floor of a handsome stuccoed house in the New Town district of Prague. When she was a child, her family inhabited the same address on the second floor, which they moved to when she was seven. The residential building is set between two landmarks: the National Theatre, an icon of Czech history and art, and Žofin Island, one of a number of small islands in the Vltava River that runs through the city. Jarcovjáková identifies with the river and the island. “It was my childhood, and I spent a lot of time there,” she said earlier this year. “It was always my starting point, coming out of this house and photographing obvious things like seabirds.” The opening pages of Jarcovjáková’s 2019 monograph, Evokativ (Czech for evocative), show birds in flight, but their thrashing wings in frozen locomotion seem to melt into the air as if vaporizing. They fail as obvious things

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