In the years between the two world wars young people in all Western lands threw off the shackles of their Edwardian upbringing and became Modern. They drank cocktails, listened to hot jazz, and, if they were artistically inclined, turned out work that followed dictates issued by the bureaux of modernism in Paris, Berlin, and Moscow. Being a Modernist must have been a bit like belonging to the Boy Scouts or the Young Pioneers: hilarious hijinks balanced with careful adherence to the party line. Obedience and conformity do not become issues when you look at the work of geniuses gravitating to the great cities (although the Parisian Surrealists were especially keen on docility among their ranks), but they are glaring in the provinces.Prague, lately sprung from the AustroHungarian Empire, was a forward-looking place, fervently tuning in signals from the epicenters of coolness north, east, and west. The results of such careful study by photographers are readily apparent in this book Czech Photographic Avant-Garde. There is a great deal of studious imitation-page after sleep-inducing page of photograms-and there is also quite a lot of synthesis of a sort that would have been impossible in the great capitals. You'd have had to be in Prague, pretty much, to co-mingle Surrealism and the Bauhaus, since in the home towns of those movements such miscegenation would have resulted in ostracism and ridicule. Mostly, however, the results of these chemistry experiments wind up as mere dial-a-stylethey have all the oomph of historical pop-music compilations (ten years of Danish punk-funk!), delicious if you were there at the time, assembly-line if you weren't.

The curtain of banality lifts in exact proportion to the cultural specificity of the work. The photograms, the formal studies, the acrobatic nudes, the montages, and a large percentage of the collages all could have been produced sooner or later in Oslo, in Melbourne, in Cleveland, but the street photography could only have been made in Czech cities at that exact time. And where boilerplate modernism results in conviction that is usually less than total-a hilariously misjudged attempt by Bohumil Stasny to replicate Man Ray's famous nude-lit-through Venetian-blinds study of Lee Miller makes the model look like the Michelin Man-engagements with the street forcibly remove the filters of mediation. This is particularly the case with the works grouped here under the heading "Surrealist Photography." The pictures of fairgrounds, shop signs, and board fences have their analogues in the early work of Cartier-Bresson and Alvarez Bravo, but they spring from everyday particulars that couldn't be calculated. Jaromir Funke had an eye for subtle dislocations in otherwise banal prospects-a walker's art that might be descended from Atget. Jindrich Styrsky, who also made some wildly erotic collages, produced series of carnival signs and artifacts that are as laconic and disturbing as the pictures Kertesz and Evans were making at the exact same time. You can add this tome to the stack of books apparently unvisited by an editorial hand. A great deal of the contents seem to have been translated literally, without regard to idiom or sense: e.g. "'An end to illusions from mock-ups of moods!'" Indeed.