This selection of photographs from an extensive collection spanning from the 1970s to today attempts to capture the timeless and poetic scenes of a single environment: city shop windows. Swiss photographer Iren Stehli, who found herself in Prague as a young student amidst the socialist aesthetics of scarcity and pettiness, recorded this environment with fascination—absurd human creativity and the charm of the unintended on the one hand and the indifference of the city’s inhabitants, herd mentality, and drabness on the other. In the period when the exhibited black-and-white photographs were taken, the main trend in analog photography was documentary. It conveyed information that was otherwise unavailable in a territory fenced off with barbed wire and closed to the media. 

However, in the series Shop Windows Stehli departed from the model of the “hidden face of communist prosperity” and documented precisely what the regime boasted about and put on display. We deliberately removed politics from the selection: shop window displays supplemented their meager assortments of goods with portraits of communist statesmen, political slogans, and posters; later, in the 1990s, these were replaced by colorful prints displaying varieties of Western Coca-Cola, scantily clad beauties, or waving golden cats.

What remained? Pure beauty without intention, an empty existence, a poem without words, a message of Kafkaesque transformation. Removed from the context of the larger whole, which presents the viewer with a society unfit for living, our selection seems like the filigree of an enchanted eye. It is a document of its time, but—as already mentioned—a quite timeless one. The aim is to present the artist as a sensitive observer who works with a time-lapse approach and to find moments in her work that transcend the medium of photography. The exhibited selection present the artist—whose works in other series  are filled with curious characters—as a demiurge of silent images where the only thing that remains of people is an emotional trace.

Iren Stehli (*1953 Zurich) went to Prague in 1972 to take a Czech language course for foreigners (her mother was Czech), and she later studied Slavic studies at Charles University. By chance, she fell in love with photography, and from 1974 to 1979 she studied at FAMU, where she made many lifelong friends, including the inspiring theorist Anna Fárová. Stehli was so enchanted by the Czech environment that she continued returning from Switzerland, and most of her independent work therefore relates to the Czech milieu (such as the famous series Dancing Lessons 1974–77, Fast-Food Fish 1976–77, Sláma, the Tailor 1976–81, Libuna 1974–2001, and Prague Shop Windows 1976–96).

She exhibited for the first time in 1978 at the legendary Činoherní klub, and since 1983 her work has appeared in numerous international exhibitions. In 2014, she had a solo exhibition entitled So nah, so fern at the renowned Fotostiftung Schweiz in Winterthur, and a year later her work was also presented at the Prague City Gallery. Iren Stehli’s portfolio also includes three publications of her own work. Her portfolio also includes three original publications.

Her photographs are held in many prestigious collections, including Centre Pompidou, Sammlung der Stadt Zürich, Sammlung der Stadt Biel, Moravian Gallery in Brno, and Prague City Gallery. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, she became the director of Pro Helvetia, a foundation supporting Czech culture, which she led for eight years. She also applied for Czech citizenship, and she still divides her time between Zurich and Prague.