On the Needles of These Days

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Combining visual artist Jindřich Štyrský’s photographs from the 1930s with an extended prose poem by fellow Surrealist Jindřich Heisler, On the Needles of These Days was originally published clandestinely in Nazi-occupied Prague in 1941 as a samizdat edition of very few copies. While Štyrský’s photos capture the daily marvelous of shop windows, mannequins, masks, wigs, prostheses, flea markets, and fairground iconography, Heisler’s text responding to the images can be read as an allusive appeal to resistance and hope. Admired by Věra Linhartová as “an analogous process where the word reiterates the image and modulates it by its own means,” it is one of the major collaborative works of Czech Surrealism.