People in the City of Coal and Steel: Visual Analysis of an Exemplary Socialist Town

Abstract

Ostrava, which used to be nicknamed the “steel heart of the republic”, was an important industrial centre during and after socialism. The city’s official visual presentation of itself during socialism was that of a happy life in an urban environment where it is already possible to catch glimpses of a glorious future facilitated by industrialization and its related transformations to the city’s everyday life and landscape. In this paper, I present a visual analysis of the official discourse about Ostrava and everyday life there. I then confront the constituent elements of this visually produced urban landscape with distinctly more ambivalent testimonies by artistic photographers from the same period. The aim is to comprehend the basic compositional elements that furnished the multilayered image of an industrial city and people’s roles there and use the two contrasting imageries of Ostrava’s urban landscape to inquire into the relationship between urban landscape and visual discourse.