“According to the legend which our grandma used to tell, the way it happened was that when my grandpa was to be born, my great-grandfather was told to go to a pub instead so that he would not be in the way at home. While he was there he befriended a salesman who dealt with haberdashery goods and the man confided in him that he did not enjoy his job at all. As they were drinking together, Ignác told him: ‘You know what, I will make a photographer of you’ and he brought him home. Since Mr. Voseček never married and he never had his own family, he thus stayed with the Šechtls. My dad thought for a long time that Mr. Voseček was actually his grandfather.”
“When he graduated from grammar school during the war, he was to be sent to do forced labour in Germany or in some factory. But if he worked for Mr. Šechtl, he did not have to. This way about fifteen people avoided being sent to Germany. But not my father, understandably, because he felt that he would have betrayed his classmates if he had avoided it. While fifteen of our relatives thus pretended that they were working for Mr. Šechtl, my dad and all his classmates went to lay concrete surface at the airport in Ruzyně.”
“Still, it was never safe to say that something would not happen. Later they introduced so-called registration numbers. People who wanted to work as free-lancers had to have a registration number. You could not exist without a registration number, because you had to write it on top of every invoice. They were making it complicated with those numbers. One day, sometime in early 1980s, they suddenly revoked my dad’s registration number, which meant that he had to go to work as an employee somewhere. But they had the photo cameras, they had their studio, lamps, flashes, and all the equipment. And so they started asking around among their friends and eventually they found out that the reason for taking away dad’s registration number was something that he had said on TV. But the problem was that he had never appeared on television. Fortunately he found out about this and the matter was fortunately clarified. They returned his registration number to him. But if a friend had not told him the reason behind it, he would have simply lost his trade and perhaps never learnt why for the rest of his life.”
Marie Michaela Šechtlová was born on March 17, 1952 into a family from Tábor who had traditionally worked as photographers. Their parents co-owned a well-known photo studio Šechtl & Voseček in Tábor, but after the communist coup d’état they had to transform it into a cooperative and eventually they became evicted completely. Marie’s father was imprisoned for one year and the family was bullied by the State Security. The police even confiscated and their precious archive of photographs and destroyed a part of it in the 1950s. Marie Šechtlová studied graphic design and illustration at the The Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague and she still engages in creative work.
