Tom Brychta – Neon Wind

“Neon Wind” is a project documenting independent local shops on 35mm film, primarily in the Czech Republic. It is common to find a wide variety of small shops in any Czech city and all over the Czech countryside, often run by foreign nationals since the 1990s. These stores provide an immensely valuable service to the local community and require great skill and work ethic to manage.

I became fascinated with these stores due to their visual character, I loved the lighting and heavy details. It all provided a welcome change to trending minimalist design that I felt saturated with. Furthermore I realised that these stores were changing, modernising or disappearing altogether under pressure from larger competitors. The combination of these two factors made this subject an ideal choice for a documentary photography project. The only camera I had at the time was an old Zenit-E from the 1970s, along with an equally old Pentacon f1.8 50mm lens. Buying a roll of film was still much cheaper than buying a DSLR and since I was generally enthusiastic about film photography, there weren’t really any other options for my medium of choice. Despite 35mm film being a difficult medium to shoot under the given conditions (low light and little time to compose shots) I discovered that it added a very specific character that I really fell in love with.

Over the last two years I have been slowly growing the project, finding more stores to shoot at, building my technical skills and improving my equipment to better suit the conditions. Another challenge I encounter is the language barrier between me and the store owners, who are often Vietnamese or Turkish. This has however just added to my interest and I slowly began to piece together their stories and explore their context. My hopes behind the project are to give this community of owners a voice, to capture the beauty of their stores and their important role to the surrounding community.

I hope you enjoy this window of colour and detail that I have worked hard to create.

– Tom Brychta