MAREK KAPLER: SBOHEM HOLEŠOVICE FOTOGRAFIE 2017-2023

Photographer MAREK KAPLER has published the book "SBOHEM HOLEŠOVICE" at his own expense, featuring a selection of photographs from the years 2016 to 2023.

On 144 pages, you will find 127 black and white photographs, and the book is printed in duplex.

Marek Kapler moved to Holešovice as an eighteen-year-old. He spent his childhood with his parents in Hradčany. Holešovice represented a completely new and unknown world for him with its character and the charm of a working-class neighborhood. His apartment on a small Plynární Street consisted of a single room with a sink, and the toilet was on the shared corridor, with a coal stove in the corner. There was a pub right in the building where garbage collectors and workers would come for their morning coffee, soup, and schnapps. Steam clouds rose from the Holešovice Brewery, where Prague beer was brewed. Marek liked to go to the Holešovice harbor to sketch cargo ships. The four chimneys of the Holešovice Power Plant gave the neighborhood a monumental look of a steel city. He experienced the last year of operation of the Holešovice slaughterhouse, accompanied by a terrible smell that hung over the entire neighborhood in the summer months. Trains were shunted at the Bubny Freight Station. The building that now houses the DOX Gallery used to be a dairy where tanker trucks would arrive in the morning. There were mills and bakeries on Jankovcova Street, as well as various factories, workshops, and warehouses, or just enclosures. He remembers the famous Manina vending machine at the corner of Dělnická and Komunardů, where people from all over Holešovice would come to eat. Many vanished pubs where social life took place. This neighborhood became dear to him; he studied graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts here and spent eight beautiful and intense years. In the 1980s, Holešovice still had the charm of a romantic periphery. Today, they are undergoing rapid transformation, turning from an authentic working-class and industrial neighborhood into a city of soulless offices and wealthy residences. Since his youth, he has moved several times around Prague. After 25 years, he returned to a place he loves and feels somehow connected to – Holešovice.