Irena Blühová

Irena Blühová was born in Považská Bystrica (Slovakia) on 2 March 1904. By the age of fourteen, she was already working at a bank to pay for herself to attend an advanced secondary school. In 1921 she joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and began taking photographs. She was a candidate for the Communist Party in 1929. Her employer then punished her by transferring her to the Kysuca valley in northern Slovakia. Her photo essays about the poverty there were used for political purposes and reprinted in leftist illustrated periodicals like Germany’s “Arbeiter-Ilustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ)”. After an article about the Bauhaus in Dessau stirred her interest in the school, she became a student there in 1931. She attended Walter Peterhans’s photo class and joined the Communist Student Faction, the so-called “Kostufra”. In addition to works from class, she also created photographs as a social activist. When the Bauhaus Dessau closed in 1932, Blühová returned to Slovakia, probably following instructions from her party. As a fighter in the antifascist resistance, she had to go underground from 1942 until the end of the war, and her photographs were destroyed. After 1945 Blühová played an active role in building up a Slovakian publishing industry and cultural education programme. At the same time, she reconstructed her photographic oeuvre from reproductions. She continued taking photographs in her old age. Irena Blühová died in Bratislava on 30 November 1991.