The scene of photography in Prague has changed radically after the fall of the Communist regime in 1989. On one side, the system of support for amateur photographers´ movement, subsidized by the state, practically disappeared and the number of various amateur photographers clubs and circles markedly decreased. On the place of the oldest photographic gallery in Europe there is, nowadays, the Hugo Boss shop. A non-commercial photographic quarterly Revue Fotografie (Photography Review) ceased to be published, prices of photography books and photographic material have increased many times. On the other hand, the actual photography life, in the Czech metropolis, is richer and more animated than ever before. Any kind of ideological censorship has come to an end and possibilities of international contacts have opened broadly. New photographic galleries came into being, specialized studies of photography are being provided by three schools and several high schools in Prague, it is possible to buy, in large bookshops, books on photography and magazines from the whole world, auctions of photographs are being held regularly. The most important is, however, that photography has left its closed ghetto and, like in many other countries, it belongs to dominant features of the contemporary fine arts. Photography exhibitions appear regularly also in the most important art museums and exhibition halls, the photography found finally its way to permanent exhibitions of the Czech art, a lot is being written about photography in art magazines, collectors and even public collections are willing to pay all the time higher and higher amounts for high quality photographs.

This boom does not appear, however, everywhere. There is a very belittling relationship towards photography till now in the National Gallery in Prague. Milan Knížák, its controversial director, who used to be, once upon a time, a non-conform artist and today is a self-oriented autocrat not allowing different points of view, refuses to establish a specialized collection of photographs in this most important Czech artistic gallery. Prague has, today, in a giant functionalist Fair Palace, one of the most extensive exhibition areas for modern and contemporary art in Europe, with an excellent collection of Picasso´s cubistic paintings, works of van Gogh, Rousseau, Klimt and Léger and a very big exposition of the development of the Czech art of 19th and 20th centuries, but the absolute majority of photographs by Drtikol, Rössler, Funke or Sudek being exposed there are technically miserable reproductions and not their originals because they are not owned by the National Gallery and the Gallery does not exercise a least effort to obtain them at auctions or by purchases directly from photographers or their heirs. Although this fact is being considered by professional people as a shame, something unimaginable in other top museums of modern art, the actual management of the National Gallery did not do anything to change this situation even if photographic works are already being collected by various other Czech galleries and museums (for example the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, the Gallery of the Capital City of Prague, the Moravian Gallery in Brno, The Museum of Arts in Olomouc, The East-Bohemian Gallery in Pardubice, The Silesian Land Museum in Opava, the Museum of Art and Design in Benešov etc.). Into a new permanent exposition in the Kinský Palace at the Old Town Square, dedicated to a landscape in the Czech art, the National Gallery incorporated once more photographs in unified reproductions, which neither by their format, nor colour scheme correspond to their originals. Mr. Knížák includes exhibitions of photographs into the exhibition programme of the National Gallery only very seldom and without any apparent conception. As really important expositions, adequate to the importance of this institution, can only be considered retrospectives of Annie Leibovitz, Antonín Kratochvíl and Josef Koudelka. They were, however, realized without Mr. Knížák´s support. He even said that such „reportage and genre photographs“ did not belong to the National Gallery at all. These words of him aroused a lot of negative reactions in daily press and in specialized magazines as well.

Mr. Knížák justifies the non-existence of a collection of photographs in the National Gallery by the fact that a big collection of photographs is owned by the Museum of Decorative Arts. Indeed, it is the most important collection of the Czech photography in the world, among whose approximately 65 thousand pictures there are more than 23 thousand photographs by Josef Sudek, more than 5 thousand works of František Drtikol (he dedicated these photographs to the Museum already during the Second World War) and thousands of period originals of further important Czech photographers (there are, however, also some rare foreign works, for example an album of rayograms „Les champs délicieux“ by Man Ray. Although the Museum has been collecting the photographs already since the beginning of the 20th century, the first specialized photography curator was Anna Fárová only in 1970. She started to buy intensively for almost symbolic prices mainly works of avant-garde photographers and organized several important exhibitions, for example, a retrospective of Drtikol and Sudek and a show „Personalities of the Czech Photography“. Today, the function of the manager of the photography collection is exercised by Jan Mlčoch. The Museum organizes exhibitions both in its own exhibition hall of the historical building, not far from the Old Jewish Cemetery, (Josef Koudelka, František Drtikol, Jaroslav Rössler), and participates in expositions in several Czech and foreign galleries. On the occasion of the last year´ s 120th anniversary of its foundation, the Museum became, last year, the main organizer of a giant exhibition „The Czech Photography of the 20th Century“ which presented, in three exhibition areas in Prague, more than 1 200 works by 423 photographers. (A narrower version of this exposition will be presented, in 2008, in the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn). A small show of development of the Czech photography makes part of a permanent Museum´s exposition „Stories of Materials“. The Museum of Decorative Arts runs also, in two rooms of a former flat of Josef Sudek, in the Úvoz street, not far from the Prague Castle, a chamber photograph gallery for which Jan Mlčoch is preparing small expositions of works by Sudek or medallions of authors represented in the Museum´s collection. The main problem of the Museum of Decorative Arts is not only a lack of financial means for a more pronounced extension of the photographs´ collection (it receives, today, most new exhibits as a gift), but also literally a catastrophic lack of space for storing collections, for the curator´ s work and his/her assistant and for researchers. Jan Mlčoch proposed, therefore, to build a new building for the Museum´s collection of photographs, but the realization of this plan is, for the time being, very uncertain.

In Prague, there are further public collections of photographs as well, but they cannot, however, compete, by their importance, with funds of the Museum of Decorative Arts. They are mostly oriented historically (the National Museum, the National Technical Museum, the Museum of the Capital City of Prague, the Náprstek Museum), only a smaller collection of the City Gallery Prague is oriented towards a contemporary creation of plastic artists working with photography. Of a more universal character is the Collection of the Union of the Czech Photographers which is, nowadays, stored in the National Archives. Among its roughly ten thousand pictures, dominate works of leading amateur photographers since the 20ies of the last century till present days, but we find there also several period originals of classic authors of the Czech photography. A specific place is occupied by a collection of photographs of the PPF Property Company. The collection came into being from the initiative of the richest Czech entrepreneur, a dollar billionaire, Petr Kellner, who is the main owner of this company (apart from many other companies including the Czech Insurance Company). Mr. Kellner started to collect photographs of Josef Sudek and, later on, institutionalized his collecting interest in one of his firms. If somebody wanted to compare the quality and range of this collection with, for example, famous corporate collections of the Gillman Paper Company or the Hallmark or with a collection of the singer and composer Elton John, he/she would probably be disappointed because with the exception of  Josef Sudek, Drahomír Josef Růžička and Jan Svoboda, the most important Czech photographers including Drtikol, Funke or Rössler are represented by second-class works and later enlargements or they miss in this collection completely. Collecting photographs is, till now, not very common in the Czech Republic although the number of people buying photographs as a hobby or for speculative reasons keeps increasing. If at auctions in Prague´s Auction Hall Dorotheum, Griesen or Václav Prošek appear recently, from time to time, photographs of Sudek, they happen to be, in many cases, sold for higher prices than is the case in New York, London or Munich and their buyers stem less and less often from abroad.

Selling of photographs had an important place also in the activities of the Prague House of Photography. The idea to create this centre of photography arose shortly before the Velvet Revolution in the spring 1989 when a group of photographers round Pavel Baňka, Jaroslav Beneš, Josef Moucha and Ivan Pinkava decided to invite further colleagues into a so-called „Get-Together of Free Photography“ whose aim was to build a new photographic gallery, publish catalogues and portfolios, incite sales of photographs and provide different forms of photography courses. Soon, they managed to find areas in a historical house in the Husova street, in the very heart of the Old Town, in which on June 5, 1991, the gallery Prague House of Photography was opened. It was a non-profit gallery run by a group of four dozens leading photographers and photography theoreticians. The exhibition programme was being put together by elected five-member managing board, the operation itself was directed, in the beginning, by the director Suzanne Pastor, an American living in Prague, she had experience in this branch from her work in the Rudolf Kicken Gallery in Cologne. The expositions of world-known photographers alternated, in the gallery, (André Kertész, August Sander, René Burri, Michal Rovner, Michael Kenna) with exhibitions of classic authors of the Czech photography to which Czecho-English catalogues were being edited (František Drtikol, Jaromír Funke, Eugen Wiškovský, František Vobecký, Tibor Honty, Václav Zykmund and others) and with expositions of contemporary Czech photographers. An important place belonged also to a yearly show called New Names which helped to discover a lot of nowadays already famous young authors. The Prague House of Photography was also publishing portfolios of limited editions of new enlargements made from negatives of Drtikol, Funke, Rössler and Wiškovský. It participated in organizing Summer Schools of Photography for interested people stemming from abroad and it was selling photographs of its members and other photographers. In the year 1998, the Prague House of Photography had to leave its original premises in the pedestrian zone and after having changed address two times, it settled down in rather more distant premises in the Haštalská street. But these were flooded during the catastrophic deluge in August 2002 and could not be used for exhibition purposes during several years. A new active director Eva Marlene Hodek found a temporary substitution premises at the Wenceslas Square No. 31 where the PHP works till now. Principally, she managed, after long discussions with the Ministry of Culture and the Prague Town-Council, to obtain enormous areas in the Revoluční street nr. 5, where a demanding reconstruction is coming to an end. After the opening of the new Prague House of Photography with a new statute, planned for 2007, there will be more than 1000 m² exhibition surfaces on two stories, a library with a reading-room, a bookstore, dark rooms and classrooms for organizing photographic workshops, there will be archives and offices. Among the first authors to exhibit there will be Carl De Keyzer, Michael Kenna and Martin Parr.

The only serious competitor of the Prague House of Photography, in the capital city of the Czech Republic, will stay the Langhans Gallery Prague. It exists from 2002 in a house in the Vodičkova street where as early as in the 19th century there used to exist a big photo atelier run by a leading portrayist Jan Langhans. In 1991, the house was, in the framework of the restitutions, given back to his great-granddaughter Zuzana Meisnerová-Wismerová, a Czech documentary films and television programmes director living alternately in Zurich and in Prague.
  
Langhans Gallerry-an opening of new exhibition She had it, together with her husband Rolf Wismer, extraordinarily imaginatively adapted (the adaptation was appreciated in a competition of the best architectural deeds of the year), in one part of the house, she established luxurious apartments, one part was rented to the biggest Czech shop with photographic accessories FotoŠkoda and, in a rugged back wing of the building, she opened, in May 2003, a several-store photography gallery with a reading room of specialized newspapers and a small café. Originally, she wanted to exhibit mainly portrait photographs, but, very soon, she extended the exhibition programme markedly. Today, the Langhans Gallery Prague combines thoughtfully top foreign exhibitions (for example Anders Petersen, Collection of F. C. Gundlach, the Ghetto of Lódź in photographs of Henryk Ross, Vu Agency, Nobuyoshi Araki) with expositions of Czech photographers. They belong, undoubtedly, to galleries of international level and importance.

Further Prague´s galleries are substantially more modest. For presentations of works of young authors penetrating only with difficulties into prestigious exhibition halls, the Velryba Gallery is of major importance, having its headquarters in impressively adapted underground premises of a popular café with the same name in the Opatovická street nr. 24, in the downtown of Prague. The Gallery in today´s conception has been existing since the year 1998 when its owner, Pavel Micka, agreed with officials from the FAMU Department of Photography to alternate there, in monthly intervals, exhibitions of the FAMU and other photographic and graphic and plastic arts schools. Young photographers receive sometimes opportunity to exhibit in the Studio of Josef Sudek as well. The most famous Czech photographer received, in the year 1927, an older wooden photo atelier on the courtyard of one of apartment houses in the Lesser Town. Till his death, in the year 1976, he was creating there publicity snapshots, clarion clean still-lives with glasses, shells or eggs. Even magic photographs from the cycle „Window of My Atelier“ in which he was capturing through dewy or frozen window a ground apple tree and other trees and bushes on a sad and grey courtyard. A fire, that broke out in the studio nine years after the photographer´ s death, blundered away plans to found there a Sudek´s museum. The already mentioned rich PPF company built, in the end, a replica of the studio where small expositions have been taking place since September 2000. But not, however, those of Sudek´s vintage prints, but rather of new enlargements of his works, of works of contemporaries of Růžička, Rössler and other authors as well as contemporary Czech photographers of young and middle-age generations.