Expat
In a Proustian moment, one smell transports a photographer back to the streets of 90s Prague
Photos and text by Bill Crandall
Driving home one warm night through Columbia Heights with the windows down, suddenly the wind carried a distinct aroma I knew very well: the slightly sweet smell of burning coal — specifically, the soft brown lignite that fuels Czech central heating systems. Anyone who’s spent time over there knows it well. Not a typical DC smell at all. But there it was.
How evocative and transporting an odor can be. Put me right back in early 1990s Prague — stale trams, monochrome days, horrible cigarettes and incredible beer, crumbling backstreets holding their secrets under layers of soot. An ancient air, long bottled, with new soft breezes of expectancy. Beauty and tenderness and darkness. Teetering between past and future, an end and a beginning. Ghosts not quite dissipated but the horsemen of globalism not yet arrived.
Cities can have gender. More than any place I’ve known, early 1990s Prague was distinctly female. A seductive Slavic beauty that looked you in the eye, a cooing mother with an apron, a grandmother who had seen too much but still traded, ultimately, in barbed kindness. Even the sing-song, dulcet tones of the Metro’s doors-are-closing announcements (“Ukoncete prosim, vystup a nastup, dvere se zaviraji. Pristi stanice: Malostranska”) have stayed with me.
I’m not sure any atmosphere will ever match it, least of all the Prague of today.
Revisiting my negatives from that period, which was about the time I was first getting serious about photography, disappoints somewhat. The pictures seemed pitifully inadequate in capturing what I felt, how Prague felt. How it smelled. Though it was interesting to find myself drawn, so many years later, to certain quieter photos I never particularly cared for before.
The traffic light turned green. My head out the car window, I sat there for an extra moment, slightly deranged, inhaling, the force of the sudden nostalgia buffeting me like the memory of a death. Czechs themselves, notoriously unsentimental, would have scoffed.
Bill Crandall is a Washington DC-based photographer, photo educator, and musician. Follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
