Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

Secret Police 2

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I want to look at another photograph from the book ‘Prague Through the Lens of the Secret Police.’

Leaving aside how the photograph came to be taken, this is, I think, a stunningly beautiful shot. Its tonal quality, the grain of the picture’s surface, the soft focus and the gradation of light from the centre of the photograph to shadow at its edges, all make for an image which revolves around the child and which, we might say, celebrates the innocence of childhood. There’s a sense of wonder in the boy’s face, his eyes staring at something we cannot see in the distance. And yet there’s also a sense of foreboding (light becomes shadow); in the figure on the pavement behind them, in the solitary car on the road, the grey concrete blocks and the double lights of the lampost which mirror the shape of the child’s eyes as if they too are watching, not what lies ahead, but what is down below. There is perhaps no point in looking ahead to the future, but the boy does it anyway.

Besides the boy and the street lamps, only the car has eyes. The woman beside him is wearing dark glasses, the figure behind is little more than a blur, and even the tower blocks seem blind without their windows. No-one inside is looking out. People are there to be looked at, nothing else. And yet the boy stares ahead, oblivious. His body is tense – perhaps from the cold – as if he’s about to run towards the future.

Of course there is one person in this image I haven’t mentioned, and that’s the person who took the picture; a  member of the Czech secret police following the woman and her child. However, unlike with the previous photograph, I do not feel I’m there within the frame. I’m very much an outsider looking in. But given how the photograph was taken (perhaps from the surveillance officer’s waist) my viewpoint is subsequently low, as if I too am a child, accentuating the sense that this is a photograph about the boy, or rather childhood: innoncence in contrast to its loss under such a regime. But these of course are interpretations made some 27 years in the future. The fact is, that this was a photograph taken for the purposes of surveillance, for control. In reality, it’s far from being the beautiful photograph I said it was earlier.

Yet it is still that: beautiful.

Over time its purpose,  as an object of surveillance, has slipped away, leaving it open to aesthetic appreciation. But there is an awkwardness here, something uncomfortable in the fact, and this is an area to whcih I’ll be returning.

Secret Police 1

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The first image I want to look at (taken from a book called ‘Prague Through the Lens of the Secret Police’ from the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes; ÚSTR, Prague 2009, 1st edition) shows a scene captured from the window of an apartment block in May 1980.

The net curtain hanging in front of the closed window serves to conceal the identity of the photographer, not only from those outside, but also from us as we look at the picture; more so even, than the fact the photographer is standing behind the camera. Nevertheless, despite the fact they can’t be seen, one is aware of the photographer’s presence. It’s almost as if the camera has captured something beyond the reach of its lens; the secret policeman is out of sight, but never out of mind, just as he was every single day, throughout the time of Communist rule in what was then Czechoslovakia.
The net curtain serves to obscure our view of the world outside, but far from removing us from what is taking place down in the street, it seems instead to immerse us in its here and now (or rather there and then). It becomes the means by which the light from that single moment in May 1980 is frozen, rather than the click of the camera’s shutter.

As I look at the photograph, the identity of the voyeur is both concealed and revealed. The space before the net curtain (that inside the room) becomes the world around me now, here in the present. I look at the image in silence (or to put it another way, I watch the image) and become aware of my breathing as well as every little noise around me; the hum of my computer, the ticking of a clock, a bird singing in the garden. It’s as if the plane of the photograph has moved a few inches forward, as if the photograph begins just beyond the curtain, with the pot of old flowers on the window sill. We are the secret police, watching through the window 30 years in the future.

This paradox is one of the consequences of photography, whatever the particular photograph we’re studying. In fact, however we research the past, we become like secret police, following people, keeping notes, putting notes in files. We document their lives as if we’re trailing them, following them down the street, around buildings or even in their own homes. And yet of course we’re always far in the distance. We follow on behind, yet we’re always way ahead. 

Returning to our image, we can assume the person being followed is the woman entering the apartment block opposite. She turns a little, as if she’s aware that she is being watched. At first glance, it’s as if she’s also being watched by the children on the right, but when we follow their gaze, we can see that two of them are looking beyond the frame of the photograph, somewhere down the street to the left. The woman being followed – our ‘target’ – is glancing that way too, as if something has made a noise. Perhaps that noise startled whoever was watching enough to take the picture?
As I look at the photograph, I rewind the scene a little. There’s the noise and its aftermath, then, in a flash I’m there walking through the doorway, stepping into the shadows beyond, my footsteps clattering, mixed in with the noise which slowly falls away in a receding echo. And as my viewpoint shifts as the observer, so I move between the scene’s protagonists at which the plane of the photograph falls away completely. Was it perhaps a broken window they heard?
Back in the room (and here in my room in the present day) I lean back, as if to avoid the possibility the target might turn her head completely and look up at the window behind, at that from behind which I’m looking 30 years in the future. I look away from her and ahead at the windows opposite. There are two of them, one open, the other closed, both dressed in the same net curtains through which I’m also peering. The sound I’ve described has found its way through the open window, carried on the wind,   along with the children’s conversation and the woman’s footsteps below. Is there someone there too, hiding behind the curtain? A neighbour looking to see what the noise was, or another member of the secret police following the same person, or even someone else? Or perhaps it’s someone else entirely who stands opposite, looking like me at a photograph somewhere in the future, one in which I’m looking back from behind a net curtain, there in the window across the street. 

© Nicholas Hedges 2024