People in the City of Coal and Steel

was an important industrial centre during and after socialism. The city’s
official visual presentation of itself during socialism was that of a happy
life in an urban environment where it is already possible to catch glimpses
of a glorious future facilitated by industrialization and its related transformations
to the city’s everyday life and landscape. In this paper, I present
a visual analysis of the official discourse about Ostrava and everyday life
there. I then confront the constituent elements of this visually produced
urban landscape with distinctly more ambivalent testimonies by artistic
photographers from the same period. The aim is to comprehend the basic
compositional elements that furnished the multilayered image of an industrial
city and people’s roles there and use the two contrasting imageries of
Ostrava’s urban landscape to inquire into the relationship between urban
landscape and visual discourse.