Bohuslav Pacholík

* 1947

  • "Something is not normal, that we simply live in times that are not normal. And that people don't even see it that way anymore. And I saw it through the situations that I photographed. Like really, it's not normal for Lenin to be somewhere between an advertisement for a potato plant, or for a forced cutout in a shop to be a poster of the Great Slovak National Uprising. It's a shitty thing to do now, isn't it. People don't even think about it anymore and shove it in there. Then all of a sudden the photo showed how absurd it was, and it's interesting how the reaction was then to the photos but not to what actually was. I had to do that with my cadre officer from the county cultural center. There was some complaint about a photo of me that they had seen out there somewhere. I was exhibiting in a little window where there was this Lenin among the potato plants. I had to go with the cadre officer to the window and show him that it was really so, that I hadn't made it up. He kept saying that I had [changed] the angle of the photograph and that I had deliberately aimed it to make it look like that, and I said, look, if that's what it really is. So in that way, they didn't have anything on me."

  • "Well the way I remember it is that I was experiencing it pretty much like horribly because it [was] such a... Well, how else to experience it, right, it was, it was horrible, so I organized a wreath collection at school and I went to his funeral with two other classmates. Which was, it was actually one huge big demonstration of still people and still at a time when the nation was still sort of together, pretty much. That was really long, I just remember the snake, long, long, long, long before Karolinum. That was awful, several hundred yards. I remember that. And that was pretty like rough."

  • "I went to train as a milling machine operator at Agrostroj and there I was a privileged child because I was the son of a clerk who went to the factory. And now the reality [is] that as I took the exams for that milling machine, I won them only because I knew that the pioneer scarf had three corners. We learned that in Pioneer independently, but there was one of the questions for that factory, why does the scarf have three corners."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Prostějov, 18.12.2021

    (video)
    délka: 01:55:36
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Olomouc, 26.02.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:39:23
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

People reacted to the photos, but not to what was actually happening

Bohuslav Pacholík, self-portrait from the book PHOTOGRAPHY - PROSTĚJOV (1985-1987)
Bohuslav Pacholík, self-portrait from the book PHOTOGRAPHY - PROSTĚJOV (1985-1987)
zdroj: archive of a witness

Photographer Bohuslav „Bob“ Pacholík was born on July 20, 1947 in Prostějov. In his childhood, he attended Pionýr, and the Zápisník třinácti bobříků (Notebook of Thirteen Beavers), given to him by his older brother, seemed to be from another world. He comes from a family of a bank clerk and a domestic seamstress, his father was a member of the Communist Party before he disagreed with the so-called „fraternal aid“ in the vetting process after the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops. The witness went on to apprentice as a millwright, where he was held up as an example for having chosen a working-class profession as the son of a clerk. He then went on to study at the Mechanical Engineering School until he finally took up a job at the Prostějov Construction Machinery. At that time, he started to take more photographs, which led to a job at the Prostějov Municipal Cultural Centre. He photographed cultural events, such as the Wolfkr‘s Prostějov, and worked as a methodologist for art classes. At the same time, he also photographed a „socially humorous critical documentary“ of the harsh normalisation, and exhibited the photos in a showcase. In 1977 he married Vera Palacka, nine years later they divorced and have two children together. He was one of the first members of the Civic Forum in Prostějov, after the revolution he was three times in the city council. He took photographs for the newspapers Prostějovský týden and Hanácké noviny, and organised many exhibitions. In 2024 he lived in Prostějov.