Mark Wiedorn - recording poverty in Prague
Mark Wiedorn is an American photographer, who has lived in Prague for the last three years. He has taken a particular interest in the lives of the Czech Republic's Romany minority. When a friend of his, the Romany social worker Marie Gailova approached him last year and told him of the plight of several Romany families who were reduced to living in squalor in a former brick factory, he agreed to take a series of photographs of the families. They had originally worked in the factory, but when it closed down they lost their apartments and were reduced to squatting in the factory building itself. With the help of Mark's vivid photographs, Marie Gailova managed to persuade the local authority in the Prague suburb of Uhrineves, to help the families, and all have now been able to return to normal flats. Here Mark talks of the experience of visiting the brick factory or "cihelna".
"It was kind of shocking at first. It's actually an old, maybe three or four hundred square metre building, which these families had divided up into apartments - for lack of a better word - no running water, no electricity. And the worst part is, it had essentially become a dumping ground for trash in that small village, and the place where these people lived, where these children lived, was surrounded by an ocean of trash. The intention was to document and just to show graphically what the situation was like, and many of the pictures show the dilapidated condition of the building, they try to show some of the surrounding trash and so forth, and the fact that basically seven or eight families used an outhouse for their sanitation needs. And I think the pictures, from what I was told did have an effect and did have some of the intended shock value, just to show - look we have to do something about this situation quickly, if possible.
I think there's still a lot of work to be done, obviously. Part of it is ignorance on the part of many Czechs, and it's not a negative ignorance, it's just the fact that they don't know that there are Roma doctors, Roma lawyers, Roma people who live everyday lives, who send their children to school. And what struck me about these people who were living in a very appalling situation in "cihelna" was that they still tried to maintain their dignity and maintain the interior of these apartments with pictures and things like that. And the kids too maintained their own dignity, but it was still clear that they led a very isolated life.
The main thing that strikes me that's the difference between these problems in the United States and here is that in the United States there are opportunities to pull yourself out of these kind of situations. I'm not sure those exist here yet."
And you can find Mark Wiedorn's photographs of the brick factory on Radio Prague's website: http://www.romove.cz/roma/cihelna/00.html
