1 A hard, merciless light

The photograph shows a young woman, relaxed, reading a journal in front of a large window in what can only be some kind of institution. She sits next to a small table, in the foreground are more journals or newspapers, and a hard chair. It has the appearance of a reading room or part of a library. There is a modern feeling about the room, which is airy, and full of light. 

The photograph was taken in the student common room at the Dessau Bauhaus, Germany, in 1930. The student, Irena Bluhova, would go on to become a co-founder of the Communist Party of Slovakia and an internationally known photographer in the 'Worker Photography Movement'. 

The WPM lasted from 1926 until 1939, starting in Germany and the USSR, and spreading across Europe and America.  The movement promoted the depiction of proletariat life and working conditions. Communist affiliated groups of amateur worker-photographers were exhorted to depict 'in a hard, merciless light' the 'iniquities and social ills of capitalism'.

'Photography has become an outstanding and indispensable means of propaganda in the revolutionary class struggle'.

In 1972, aged 68, Irena Bluhova, along with a group of other reformist intellectuals, was briefly arrested at her home in Bratislava. By 1979 her daughter Zuzana, a political refugee living in London, had decided to ensure the safety of her mother's negatives archive by having them spirited out of Czechoslovakia to the west.

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