How did your practice of collecting vernacular photographs start? What kind of initial reaction or impression did you have, as a 17-year-old boy, when you stumbled across the negatives capturing Europe and North Africa of the 1930s in the family house attic?

Photography became a very important part of my life already at the age of twelve when I started taking photographs. When I was fifteen, I went to a photography school. As a person interested in everything related to it, I gradually came to have a certain interest in second-hand things, old books, and antiques—a hobby that led me to collecting negatives until today.

One initial and key moment was a story connected to my grandparents. They lived in a house located near Sudety* in the Czech Republic. This region, mostly inhabited by the German population, was part of the border zone with Germany until the end of WWII. My grandparents moved there somewhere in the 1970s or 1980s. But the house itself was originally built by the German residents. After my grandfather died in 1995, I began organising stuff in the attic and discovered a box full of coloured slides. I began looking at them and noticed that they depicted the same house I was in. There was the street where our house stood, and there were red flags with Nazi symbols on it. Looking at the faces of the people who once lived in this very house, I gradually realised that the place I lived in had a much longer and more intricate history than I had previously been aware of.

How did this practice of hunting and collecting amateur photographs evolve into a structured representation?

I started to build my archive of old photographic negatives on the basis of collections that I already had by giving them collection numbers. There were initially four of them: those slides taken by Germans in the Sudety area got number three in my budding collection. I gave the number one to the colour slides that my mother took when I was a kid. Number two was the collection of my grandfather's black and white negatives, and number four was an author named František Beneš, who travelled around Europe and North Africa and whose relatively big archive I already had.

One number in the collection may be characterized as if walking down the street and discovering a box of negatives by the trash can. You pick up that box of negatives and you bring it to me. And no matter how many negatives there are, I always give them a collection number. And so, little by little, an archive is created. Within years my wife and I started to build this archive, which now has about five hundred collection numbers. 

Moreover, as a photographer, I had been working on various projects photographing and publishing documentary works shot in Siberia and Ukraine in the 2010s. And suddenly Covid-19 came. While I was closed in my studio, the situation with Russia deteriorated. I realised it would be difficult for me to go there to film. Then I remembered about my drawer full of negatives. So, just due to the course of many circumstances, we became interested in this archive of ours with my wife and started to intensively develop and digitise it.

This is probably when the book “Negatives from the Trash Can” was initiated.

Yes. Since I am not the kind of person who would just leave things in a drawer for years even after having them digitised, I decided to do something. It was then that, with my wife, Svetlana, we came up with the idea of opening a group on social media. The public group, like the book that was published later, is called Negatives from the Trash Can: even though we have not finally decided whether it is Negatives from the Trash Can or Negatives from the Dumpster. In fact, it is a provocative title, which is partially true: some negatives are indeed from the rubbish bin, but some of them are from flea markets or online auctions.

Actually, I didn't expect that this page of ours would have, at this point, over twenty-one thousand followers. Lately, what is very positive in connection with our activity and with the book is that every week somebody reaches us saying, "Hey, I have a box of negatives here. If you digitise it, I will give it to your archive as a gift." And we accept this with great joy. Even more exciting is that followers often contribute valuable details in the comments about the places, the people, or the events in the photographs. There is something truly fascinating about bringing forgotten negatives back to life and watching new layers of history unfold through the community’s knowledge.

What was your initial idea behind showcasing over 200 photographs in one book? What kind of new features did you discover about the photographs or possibly the people captured in them while curating and preparing this publication?

We are always discovering new things, partly thanks to evolving technology. Twenty years ago, we scanned negatives with slow flatbed scanners. Now we use cameras, which is much faster. Nowadays we also test new devices in Czech archives for quick digitization of 35mm film. That is the technical part. To think more deeply, I can say that after dealing with a large amount of vernacular photographs from the past century, a person very intensely begins to realise how short human life is and how connected is the chain of generations that lived here before him. To see that it was actually quite recent, that there is almost nothing left after those people. It is a certain temporality ... In fact, one might find it depressing. You look at how people used to live and realise that cities were much more comfortable for residents—no cars everywhere, just people walking on streets designed for them. The city was not isolated either; the surrounding region was part of everyday life. But now, when you return with a camera to capture the same place, you are confronted with the fact that everything has faded away.

Amateur photographers tended to photograph what was in front of them—family, neighbours, and daily routines. In your collection, what kinds of patterns emerge about who and what people cared about the most? What themes are repeated across time and region?

I have noticed that amateurs had similar interests as professional photographers. For example, I, as a photographer, firstly would capture my beloved wife or my son, be it on a seaside vacation, Christmas holiday, etc. These are actually certain archetypes that have been repeated for hundreds of years, and we could say that we mostly try to capture the moments when we are happy.

Josef Moucha, a Czech photographer, photography theorist and journalist who also contributed a text to the album, described the book as documenting the "extraordinary in the ordinary." What does this mean to you in the context of early 20th-century vernacular images, particularly from Central and Eastern Europe? 

When I take a camera in my hands to take a picture, I think with my head first. But if I think too much with my head rather than my heart, I will end up having soulless images. The same applied to selecting photos from the collection for a publication or an exhibition. The photograph should resonate with you; it should have elements of mystery and tension in it. The image has to raise certain questions so that a person does not get tired of it after thirty seconds of looking. But one negative itself contains little story in it, and only after putting several shots together does one discover a much broader and much more beautiful history. I think this idea of having a sequence of independently made ordinary shots in one book creates the extraordinary picture of one period of 20th-century Europe.

You’ve observed that, in many cases, neither you nor the heirs can identify the people in the photographs. There is a kind of freedom in this lack of fixed context. How do you navigate the tension between interpretive openness and historical responsibility in your collecting and publishing process? Conversely, how do you make responsible choices between narrative creation and reality?

Honestly, if I had been a fastidious and law-abiding person, maybe I would not have been able to create this project at all. We have to take into account the fact that in ninety-nine percent of cases I do not know the author. If I do, I try to find his children and ask them for permission to use these negatives. In fact, we deal with “orphan works,” meaning that as long as you do not know the author, and you have failed to find him, you have permission to use their work in a certain way. But only until the moment when someone comes to say, ‘My grandfather filmed this.’ From then on, that status changes.

In terms of choices I made while curating the book, I can say that those choices were not one-sided. Together with my friend Josef Moucha, we selected those photographs that resonated with us… the ones we ourselves would capture. In fact, the selection is subjective, but we tried to choose photos that create some history of people in the Czech Republic in the first half of the twentieth century. And you know what the scary thing is? The scariest thing is that after publishing the book, thousands of new glass negatives came to us, from which we could have published another book like this.

The book states that “the photographs capture a disappearing world. Its end, which is neither tragic nor resembles a happy ending. It is a walk into the past, capturing the authenticity that we miss, but we would no longer be able to, nor would we want to, live it." -- What do you think was lost that now is only in the photos? What aspects of everyday life in Eastern Europe do the photographs in the book recreate?

I have noticed that after publishing digital photographs of various negatives on social media, people genuinely miss that period. They reflect on how different the world was, right? But I believe it is largely those who are emotional and simply gaze at the images and fantasize that their lives were precisely as they seem in the photos. If a person thinks about it, he realises it is just a fragment of the lifestyle of that time. A photograph is exactly what people wanted to leave after them. It says nothing at all about whether that time was happier or not, because photography itself is completely subjective. So I do not approach photographs as any kind of proof of quality of life. One thing I can say is that technology has made people's lives easier since they no longer have a need to communicate with others. And I think when people look at pictures from the past, they see that individuals used to have stronger social ties. This is what they remember, miss and try to recall constantly.

In “Negatives from the Trash Can: 1900-1945” the closing image of a boy riding a cannon-like thing conveys innocence entangled with war. Why did you close the book with that photo? What do you hope viewers infer?

I think this photograph carries both calmness and tension in it at the same time. The photo as if invites us to observe that something big has ended and the machine killing people suddenly has lost its character, and it now lies abandoned as children play with it. And we really liked it when we noticed another photograph from the end of the First World War capturing a similar scene: if you turn the pages, you will see a photograph of the two kids in Paris on a trophy cannon filmed in 1919. After putting these images side by side, you may realise that a quarter of a century has passed, but nothing has really changed. Trophy cannons are displayed, children sit on them, and life goes back to normal.

You are also a photographer. Since 1998 you have been photographing different parts of Ukraine and Russia. It is fascinating to see your photos of the sites of former Soviet gulags in Vorkuta, various communities of Siberian Old Believers, the Kuril Island volcanologists, the Trans-Siberian Railway, oil wells in the Far East, Siberian reindeer herders, whalers on the Chukchi Peninsula, frozen Lake Baikal, and many more. What was the driving push for you to embark on a journey to these areas reaching up until Siberia to photograph the everyday life there?

It started when I was a schoolboy. Back then I was taught all the usual communist ideology… Lenin, Stalin, the Aurora… But by the time I was ten, everything began to change. After the Velvet Revolution, people could finally speak openly about political prisoners, Stalinist repressions, and life in the Soviet Union. Around that time, sometime in the early ’90s, my parents and I went to Germany and Austria. On the surface, life there looked very different: towns and villages looked well-kept, beautiful, and orderly. But oddly enough, I got bored of that.

At fourteen, already photographing, I convinced my stepfather to travel with me to Transcarpathia. The untouched nature fascinated me very much. Later within the years, I believed naively that the further east I went, the deeper into history I would travel. But that was not quite true.

What did you discover there? How different was it from your expectations, from the image in your head?

It took me around 25 years to make my dream come true: in Russia, the villages gave way to concrete blocks and industrial sprawl. And when I finally reached Chukotka, there were only panel buildings and low barracks. The poetic past I had been chasing was hard to find, though widely scattered whale and walrus bones gave a strange feeling of a return to the Stone Age. Photography helped me observe all this; it gave me a reason to look closely. Also, looking at old negatives, I saw people who lived before me but who, like me, chose to capture their lives. It is then I appreciated our incredibly priceless life.

What connects the material you collect with the scenes you choose to shoot? Do you see threads—geographical, thematic, or emotional? Are your photographic and collecting practices emotionally or intellectually linked? Or do they fulfil different creative needs for you?

This is a very important point for me—to try to feel what I want to photograph. And it is with that same feeling that I approach selecting existing photographs. I have not really thought about any direct connection between my own creative work and the photos by other authors that we digitise.

As a documentary photographer, I was interested in capturing how people live. And that is actually very close to what I look for in the negatives we receive. Because if I had only photographed still lives, for example, it would be hard to find anything similar in these archives. But since this is also documentary photography, I try—even when the archive seems dull or monotonous—to create a selection that will create a story interesting to others.

I am curious about your future plans, both short-term and long-term. Do you have any upcoming projects? And what are your plans for the photographs posted in your Facebook group?

One of my main goals is to publish a follow-up to the “Negatives from the Trash Can,” covering the period from 1945 to 1968. I also want to reduce my reliance on Facebook and create a dedicated website where the archive can be freely accessed. I process and publish negatives simply because I love the result. I enjoy seeing people engage with my work.

Thanks to this project—through Facebook, exhibitions, and talks—people with negatives have started reaching out and offering their materials. I find that deeply meaningful. Many people who have received family archives, understand how valuable the content is. At the same time, they frequently lack the time, skills, and resources to deal with it. If there was an institution where these negatives could be digitised and stored while families retained ownership, preservation would be much easier. But there’s a big question: if a large institution like a state archive eventually would take on this task, would the passion that drives this project survive? Once everything becomes administrative and official, the joy can fade. And joy—that’s important!