Focused on ironworks. Finding places from the past was often a detective job for the photographer.

Photographs of metallurgical plants from century or more ago, together with imagines of their modern appearance are presented in a exhibition entitled Focus on werk in the changes of time. A pair of 20 historical and 20 current photographs captured by Pavel Zubek´s lenswill be on display in the garden of the Třinec Ironworks Museum from the beginning of June.

It was opened on Wednesday, 5 June, during a joint meeting where former employees of the ironworks, who retired in 2023, remembered their years at the ironworks.

For the historical photographs, the organisers of the exhibition drew on the archive of the ironworks from glass negatives, which contains the oldest surviving historical photographs from as early as 1864. The industrial photographer Pavel Zubek took on the difficult task of capturing the modern appearance of the ironworks plants.“Sometimes it was a shift. I would say it was detective work,“ he said. He took pictures from bridges, ladders and rooftops. He also used a drone to get to the level of the original shots.

„Sometimes I was thinking that there was a place I knew in the historical picture. But then I discovered it was a completely different space and I had to recapture it. And often searched in vain for the place from whitch the hundred-year-old view was taken. I wanted to make it as close as possible to that angle,“ says Pavel Zubek.

His photographs have been part of the modern archives of the steelworks for many years. „The extrusion of coke, the blast furnaces, the pouring of iron from the pans into the converters at the steelworks, the pouring of slag ath the tailings dump but also the rolling of rails or wire and the opportunity to watch people at work. All this still interests me to this day. I want to record it on the chip of my camera and leave these moments for future generations,“ added the photographer, who has been mapping the company since 2006.

The project of the exhibition Focused on werk in the changes of time to gave him the opportunity to visit places where he hasn´t been in the past with his camera. He met many interesting and, as he says, mainly helpful people. And for the first time he saw images from history that he had no idea about before. „It was an honour for me to be given the opportunity to show the modern face of the metallurgical enetrprise in the reflection of historical images of the Třinec smelter,“ he concluded.

The exhibition is open to the public for free in the garden of the Museum of Třinec ironworks and the city of Třinec from 6 June to 30 September.