Svetozar Guček (14 December 1919–22 April 2010), known to friends as Zare, was a cartoonist, dedicated sportsman, compere of musical evenings, photographer and publicist.
Born in Dvor at Žužemberk, Svetozar Guček completed the second and third grades of primary school in Zagreb, and later secondary school and the business academy in Ljubljana. During the Second World War, he was first interned as an activist in Dachau concentration camp for treason, but survived to be liberated as an inmate in Litomeřice in the Czech Republic. After the liberation, he joined the Enotnost Ski Club in Ljubljana.
Together with various jobs he held during his professional career, his other career path, devoted to skiing, ski jumping, publishing and photography, which is almost equal, if not more important. He organized and led courses for ski judges, was himself an international judge for ski jumping between 1964 and 1974, a member of the Planica organizing committee, a skiing instructor and the main representative of the ski judges of Yugoslavia in the International Skiing Association. He studied the history of skiing in Slovenia and, from the end of the 1980s, he was an evaluator of ski equipment at old-style skiing events.
His great love was photography. The range of topics is very wide. Part of the fund that is kept in the National Museum of Contemporary History dates back to the time before the Second World War, to the period of his military service in Sarajevo in 1938-1939.
His post-war oeuvre is extremely extensive and thematically diverse. It includes many photos of Planica in the period 1948-2000. He documented competitions, the award of medals, visits by representatives of the political elite, competitors, world champions, flight record holders, competition organizers and so on.
Another very important part of the fund is photographs of Ljubljana, created within the opus Ljubljana that no longer exists – buildings that have been demolished. In this case, Guček is an exceptional documentalist of “construction” events in Ljubljana in the 1960s and 1970s. In the footage, we can follow the renovation of the Ajdovščina paving, the former Titova cesta (today’s Slovenska), the intersections of today’s Celovška, Tivolska and Gosposvetska streets, the construction of the Maximarket garage and Trg republika (formerly Trg revolucija). We can also observe the (now discontinued) traffic in the very centre of the city, as well as views of Ljubljana’s streets and parks, and the facades of houses.
Svetozar Guček was a man of many talents, a witness of his times, especially the second half of the 20th century, whose material will certainly be an important addition to researchers of sports, illustration, architecture and construction, and ethnology.
