Markéta Luskačová

Markéta Luskačová studied at Charles University, Academy of Performing Arts and Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. The recorded working language is Czech. Work by Markéta Luskačová is recorded in the collections of Tate, Museum of Modern Art and J. Paul Getty Museum. Distinctions recorded are Personality of Czech photography.

Luskačová was born in Prague. In 1968 she graduated from Charles University there with a thesis on religion in Slovakia. During her stay in Slovakia, she became familiar with the old Christian rites and decided to return with a camera to document the surviving traditions. Her thesis was titled Poutě na Východním Slovensku (Pilgrimages in East Slovakia). Following that she studied photography at FAMU, in this period photographing in Slovakia and Poland. From 1970 to 1972, Luskačová photographed stage performances of the Za branou theatre, founded by director Otomar Krejča. However, the theatre was banned by communists in the spring of 1972. The same year, she was allowed to display the cycle Pilgrims in the Gallery of Visual Arts in Roudnice nad Labem (the curator of the exhibition was the photography theorist and art historian Anna Fárová). In 1971, Luskačová married the poet Franz H. Wurm (native of Prague and a British citizen). Wurm, terrified by the "Normalization" in Czechoslovakia, left the country and Luskačová asked the state authorities for permission to visit her husband abroad. After several short visits she received a form for emigration (1975) and went to live in England. However, in an interview she claimed: "Bohemia, Prague and Šumiac have never ceased to be my home. I always took my life abroad as a kind of stopgap that stretched to be a considerable part of my life." In the 1970s and 1980s, the communist censorship attempted to conceal her international reputation. Her works were banned in Czechoslovakia, and the catalogues for the exhibition Pilgrims in the Victoria and Albert Museum were lost on their way to Czechoslovakia. Luskačová started photographing London's markets in 1974. In the markets of Portobello Road, Brixton and Spitalfields, she "[found] a vivid Dickensian staging". As a Magnum Photos nominee, Luskačová photographed Chiswick Women's Aid in the 1970s. Shortly afterwards, she and the photographer Chris Killip had a son, Matthew. The photographs remained unpublished until 2020. In 2016 she self-published a collection of photographs of street musicians, mostly taken in the markets of east London, under the title To Remember: London Street Musicians 1975–1990, and with an introduction by John Berger.

• Illustration — Luskačová, Prague, 2008 • Photographs from the Beaches (with Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen). Side Gallery (Newcastle), 1978. • North Tyneside (with Izabela Jedrzejczyk, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Graham Smith). Side Gallery (Newcastle), 1981. • Pilgrims. Side Gallery (Newcastle), 1985. • Primary Concerns. Side Gallery (Newcastle), 1989. • Photographs of Spitalfields. Whitechapel Art Gallery (London), 1991. • Poutníci. Fotografická galerie Fiducia (Ostrava), 2001–2002. • No Such Thing as Society: Photography in Britain 1968–1987. Aberystwyth Arts Centre; Tullie House, Carlisle; Ujazdów Castle, Warsaw; Luskačová is one of a number of photographers shown. • The Photogeny of Identity – The Memory of Czech Photography, National Museum of Photography (Jindřichův Hradec), 2008. • The Third Side of the Wall: Photography in Czechoslovakia 1969–1988 from the Collection of the Moravian Gallery in Brno. Moravian Gallery in Brno, 2008–2009. • Markéta Luskačová, Tate Britain, London, January–May 2019.

• Chiswick Women's Aid 1976–77. Southport: Café Royal, 2020. Edition of 500 copies. • Ireland 1972–73. Southport: Café Royal, 2021. Edited by Craig Atkinson.