Jan Lukas, R.I.P.(Obituary)

I RECALL sitting one day at my desk with two stacks of photographs by Jan Lukas in front of me. On one side was a collection of representative views taken by Lukas during the twenty years of his liberty; on the other side, the previous week's routine photos, shot at the studio on 23rd Street where Firing Line was usually filmed. The former, which would make up his new book, The Islanders, were, as one would expect a special selection to be, spectacular examples of the photographer's art. The latter were his workaday stuff. But as I stared at those half-dozen pictures I was reminded that the workaday stuff of a serious artist is almost always taken for granted, but then so is the workaday stuff of nature, like the dazzling light changes on the Long Island Sound just down the slope from where I was sitting.

There, in one photograph in the current stack, was Firing Line's director, Warren Steibel, tieless as usual, huge of dimension, wearing glasses, his lips framed to convey that he had just given out a no-nonsense order to the crew. The three guests were seated, the first a venerable journalist, a student of the Soviet Union--in the photograph he is peering at the director, amused, curious; the second, a young, bright iconoclast, dyspeptically British--he was just a little bit ill-at-ease, his head cocked own as if contemplating his approach to the program about to begin; the third, an English poet-historian, ice-calm: He had done his work, and now he would transcribe his thoughts for us. And in moments we would all be discussing, and then viewing, the documentary Harvest of Despair, a record of the great tribulation imposed on the Ukraine by Josef Stalin when Jan Lukas was seventeen years old.

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Lukas was born in Prague in 1915, when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Three years later Czechoslovakia became an independent country, plucked from the ravages of World War I, the first installment of the awful ugliness of the 20th century.

Jan Lukas was not in the Ukraine to photograph the starvation of a dozen million people, and though artistically it is a risk to say such a thing, I am glad that he was not, as I would not wish for so graphic a registering of one more tragedy, however singular--he would see quite enough.

But Lukas was a professional voyeur, and history paraded right outside his window, great, hideous hunks of history. He was twenty-three when the Nazis put an end to the short-lived freedom of the fledgling republic he grew up in. He was in his early thirties when the Communists staged the coup that aborted the freedom briefly experienced by Czechoslovakia after the liberation. There came, five years later, the death of Stalin, followed by a brief liberalization; but this was cut short when, next door in Hungary, the Soviet tanks trampled the students, reminding Eastern Europe that satellization was viewed by the Soviet Union as a permanent transaction. Jan Lukas, by then a ...