After almost four full days in Prague, I have very few photos taken around town. About five, in fact. I started shooting some colourful, wonderfully-ornamented facades at the start of my first day when I realized that there was colour and wonderful ornamentation all over the city and everywhere you looked.
It was impossible to turn around in the older districts of the city (and even some of the more modern neighbourhoods) without setting eyes on a remarkably charming cityscape, a fragment of which any other town would be lucky to have. Were I to stop and photograph everything that caught my eye, I realized, I would probably have to stop every 30 seconds, and I wouldn’t be able to see nearly as much of the city as I would have liked. So, I decided to put away the camera and just explore, rather than let myself be overwhelmed more than I already was.
Is the loss so bad? In this age of Google image search and flickr photo albums, what is the point of taking photos of that which has likely been photographed thousands of times already much better than I ever could and made public, except to prove that I was, indeed, there? (To wit: When I posted on my facebook profile about how beautiful Prague is, a friend accompanied a comment about its “ridiculous” beauty with a link to a flickr page of Prague photos.) Of course, only my photos could approach how I saw the city, you could say, and fair enough, except once again there was just so much to see.
No matter how many times I saw the glimmer of gilded ornament against age-blackened stone, it never failed to arouse an equal sense of delight and mystery. The sheer variety of facade treatments there was astounding, from landscapes painted directly on the wall to sculpted stucco so three-dimensional they peeled away from the building to a weirdly effective two-tone technique alternating between smooth coloured surfaces and dark rough-textured patches. This irrepressible love of ornament extended to the interwar-era functionalist buildings, surprisingly enough, whose precise and even luxurious detailing—modernist poetry rather than merely utilitarian—made them a match for their joyful Baroque and Art Nouveau neighbours. I’m convinced that this city also uniquely experimented with Cubist architecture precisely because its architects sought a modern means of indulging their love of the ornamental. Why reject that to which Prague already owed so much?
Something else my camera might not have been able to capture was the way in which Prague’s art and architecture, for all of its quality, possess so few iconic masterpieces. Of course the city has plenty of famous individual works, but these are so few relative to the wealth and variety of good work everywhere and all over the place. It makes Prague feel more democratic in its beauty, if I can say that; rather than restricting peaks of expression to a genius elite while most of the city is left to contend with the plain or rational, its culture has given freer reign to slight slips of taste, reflections of the greats and the what-the-hell, if only to have more of it to share.
Could my little camera (or its sad video cam) really capture the curious pleasure of the giant red metronome keeping time on the hilltop at the end of the bridge? Or the way the Death skeleton on the side of the medieval clock tower rings the bell each hour, on the hour? Or the sense of discovery of wandering through yet another shopping arcade—more numerous and emptier than those in Paris? Or how the back of St. Vitus Cathedral looms over its square, or how the inaccessible side chapel in St. George’s Basilica plays an odd game of peek-a-boo with the main altar space? Four days would not have been enough to photograph all of this, and left with the option between trying to capture Prague and simply enjoying it, I think you’ll forgive me my decision.
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