Picture does not say (necessarily) thing that is not any more, simply just what was. (R. Barthes, Camera Lucida)

In the Kolín district public archive, I found a picture of boys in shirts, with sleeves that are either too short or too long, tucked into white gloves. One of them has a disproportionately large wristwatch showing on his left wrist. However unimportant the details of the photograph, taken by Mr Kronus at the 1983 district KSČM conference at the Kolín cultural centre, it is thanks to them that a memory of Camera Lucida surfaced in my mind, and it was precisely this stigmata that caused me the ‘injury’ of which Roland Barthes writes. The photograph, which in the first place documents one of the rituals of the previous regime, hence gained a purely personal meaning for me.

Although one would not quite label the photograph as historical, its noema is clearly legible, it already has a perceptible feeling of “liquidation of Time: this is dead and this is dying”. I do not know the boys holding the flag, nor their fate. I have, at most, a vicarious experience of communism, though of course the ‘this was’ element of this photograph touches me deeply during its display in the ideal setting that is the cultural centre building, built in the brutal style of social realism.

If I walk up the two floors of the building to the photograph, located in a room, a countless number of such stigmata in varying forms ‘injure’ my gaze; in rapture I make note of the plants in the corridors: one of them could possibly be the plant captured in the photograph.

– Jan Šimánek