The true Story of a Picture and of the Spring of Bratislava 1968

The Bielik family’s experience of the world of photojournalism should give us pause before we mount any moral high horses. With an audience swelled to nearly 10 by the presence of some loyal fellow-Slovaks, Peter Bielik – son of photojournalist Ladislav – took us through the story of ‘The Spring of Bratislava, 1968’.

His father’s iconic image of the bare-chested man standing in the path of a Soviet tank has been published worldwide. And only once with the permission of the copyright holder.

With Bielik and his originals going underground in the face of Soviet reprisals, the German press agency DPA copied the picture from the local newspaper in which it was first used. Cropped, retouched and captioned wrongly as Prague not Bratislava (that sent a frisson through the Slovaks present) the picture was subsequently used around the world under a bewildering variety of bylines.

When the originals were discovered following Ladislav’s death and the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the Bielik family embarked on a long legal struggle for ownership and copyright, finally winning a court ruling in 2005.

I must confess to being initially sympathetic towards DPA. At a time of revolution behind the Iron Curtain it can’t have been easy establishing the provenance of the picture; no credit appeared when it was first used. And the argument that this was a picture that needed to find as wide an audience as possible is compelling.

Less excusable is their refusal to acknowledge ownership when the originals were discovered and their continued marketing of the image against the Bieliks’ wishes. When it was discovered that a cut of the royalties had been going to the German student who smuggled the original newspaper out of Bratislava, my professional solidarity evaporated.

Wandering though the exhibition, I was struck less by the famous tank shot with its uncanny premonition of Tiananmen Square than by Bielik’s studies of the Soviet soldiers – by turns aggressive, scared and bored.

Peter Bielik is now considering his options for the future distribution of his father’s images. He is understandably cautious.