Baťa is here!
Viktor Fischer, 1992
„The photo from the opening of Baťa store in Prague´s Wenceslas Square was taken in 1992,“ the sixteen-time winner of the Czech Press Photo award Viktor Fischer recalls. „I was a student of the Department of Photography at Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts in Prague for the second year then and I photographed Wenceslas Square as a compulsory school project. I chose a reconstruction of the famous store built in times of the first Czechoslovak republic as my topic. A modern department store began to rise up here and it was very an unusual and unprecendeted thing. Baťa store was a symbol of West so it attracted a lot of citizens´ attention. The closer it was to the opening the more they didn´t want me to go in. During the very opening I almost could not get in. It was so crowded, Tomáš Baťa himself arrived, everybody was nervous, bodyguards and policemen everywhere... Finally I got in. They were looking for a pair of scissors and I was taking pictures.“
