BÍLINA – The story of the purple river
Ibra Ibrahimovič (1967) has been photographing his black-and-white series ”Střepy severních Čech” (Pieces of Northern Bohemia) since the early 1990s. He became known to the public as a photographer of the struggle to save the village of Libkovice in 1993, and later in 2003 with an award-winning series about farmer Rajter.
With the support of the Ministry of the Environment and TGM WRI, the book Příběh fialové řeky (The Story of the purple river) was published in 2015, describing through photographs the turbulent fate of the Bílina river, perhaps the only river in our country that is said to have burned due to pollution. Ibra Ibrahimovič takes photographs mainly on black and white film, 6 x 12 cm, and thus tries to follow the pictorial message of Josef Sudek and Josef Koudelka, who recorded the local landscape in a similar way in the 1970s and 1990s.
In his wanderings around the Bílina river, he looks for places that tell of man‘s relationship to this river, as well as those that reflect its turbulent history. His goal is to testify to what this river, which flows in the vicinity of surface lignite mines and chemical plants, looks like today, because from his childhood, he remembers it as a dark sewer stinking of phenols.
