Libuše Jarcovjáková

Libuše Jarcovjáková studied at Academy of Performing Arts and Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. The recorded working language is Czech. The field of work recorded is visual arts, painting and graphics. Places of work recorded in the authority are Prague. Distinctions recorded are Personality of Czech photography.

• Name — Libuše Jarcovjáková

Jarcovjáková was born in Prague in what was then the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Her parents were painters. She studied for an MA at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.

At the end of the 1970s she undertook a creative residency in Japan for several months. In 1985 Jarcovjáková moved to West Berlin and in 1992 returned to Prague. She has been teaching photography since the 1990s, currently doing so at the College of Graphic Design and the Secondary School of Graphic Design (VOŠ a SPŠ Grafická v Praze) in Prague. Jarcovjáková's written diaries and photographs from Prague, West Berlin and Tokyo between 1971 and 1987, were published in the 2016 book Černé Roky (The Black Years). Between 1983 and 1985, Jarcovjáková photographed the inhabitants of a clandestine gay bar in Prague, called T-Club, which she frequented visited almost every night, using black and white film and a flash. Her other subjects at this time were herself and Vietnamese and Cuban economic migrants. Though sex between people of the same gender was decriminalised in Czechoslovakia in 1962, people continued to be imprisoned for being openly gay. Because the work depicted her own sexual deviance as well as that of people at T-Club, it was not shown until 2008 and was published in 2019 as Evokativ. Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian, described the work as having an "edgy diaristic approach, laying bare a life lived recklessly amid a period of political repression" [...] "images that pay little attention to formal concerns, but nevertheless capture a time and milieu in an uncompromising way." Jarcovjáková's life and work were the subject of the 2024 feature documentary film I'm Not Everything I Want to Be, directed by Klára Tasovská, which premiered at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival.

• Anamnesis / Remembering, Galerie 1. Patro (Gallery 1st Floor), Prague, 2012 • T-Club, Langhans café, Prague, 2019 • Evokativ, Église Sainte-Anne d'Arles, Rencontres d'Arles, Arles, France, 2019

The following is established of the heading itself.

• Černé Roky: 1971–1987, [The Black Years: 1971–1987]. Prague: Nakladatelství Wo-men, 2016.. Photographs, letters and journal entries. In English and Czech. Includes booklet titled The Black Years / English trial version, in English. • Evokativ. Prague: Untitled, 2019.. With texts by Jarcovjáková and Lucie Černá. Edition of 1000 copies.

• Ženy 60+. Prague: Nakladatelství Wo-men, 2018. Text by Pavla Frýdlová and photographs by Jarcovjáková..