Martin Bouzek (*1977, Prague) is a documentary photographer and a member of the VERUM PHOTO association, belonging to the admirers of black-and-white photography.

His journey into photography began in high school when he received a reflex camera as a birthday gift. He initially focused on capturing his travels across Asia and, over time, started collaborating with Photo Life magazine. After a years-long hiatus from photography due to sports, he rediscovered his passion and realized that great images can be found simply by looking around—there is no need to seek out exotic destinations. Another vital aspect of his life is water. With his camera always at hand, he and his loyal friends go down wild and remote rivers.

Seakayak – Sea Wandering is a photo essay complemented by a text written by Petr “Snížák” Snížek, editor-in-chief of Pádler magazine:

Seakayaking?

A sleek, narrow boat with sharp bows rising high above the water. On the deck: a spare paddle, a waterproof bag, a handy water bottle, and other essentials. Below the kayak, crystal-clear blue water, revealing the seabed even several meters deep. Further out, the open sea turns into a deep, dark blue abyss. Sleeping under the stars on sandy beaches, cooking over an open fire…

A romantic idea, isn’t it? But what is seakayaking really like?

An hour of preparation—packing everything into waterproof bags and squeezing them into the storage compartments of the kayak. A 25-kilogram boat with an equally heavy load. Then, getting in and…

“Where are we headed, Bouzína?”

“I think toward those buildings in the distance.”

“Where that red lighthouse is?”

“Yeah, somewhere over there. I’d say about three kilometers. Maybe… Three and a half. Four. Maximally.”

Then, you set the kayak’s bow in the right direction and start paddling. And paddling. Chatting for a while with the person paddling next to you—while still paddling. After some time, you realize that the destination isn’t getting closer as quickly as you thought, and eventually, you’re just grateful to reach the first checkpoint. You get out, stretch your legs, and plan the next move.

Another checkpoint. And the cycle repeats. Paddling… and more paddling. In the evening, an Adventure Menu meal, a quick swim in the sea, and then off to sleep, with satisfaction.

And the next day? Well, you can probably guess how it goes. And yet—we absolutely love it. Why? Maybe because it can’t be described. It can only be experienced.

Kevin V. Ton’s black and white grayscale photography captures the essence of the existence of the element of humanity in the everyday life of a Prague street. The street is a place, a living organism, where countless random situations and spontaneous human interactions of all kinds take place. For Kevin, the fascination with the constant flow of people and their reactions in a microsecond community has become a lifelong photographic impulse to capture empathy, emotional bonds, or the degree of understanding of an individual or community across time and space. Throughout history, streets have been a natural space to express the ordinary state of being, but they are also a space that speaks of the triumphs and falls of individuals and society in general. For Kevin V. Ton, the street represents a fundamental photographic space for the depiction of scenes worth capturing. It is a space for self-awareness and retrospective reflection, perception, communication, and the creation of relationships that can trigger curiosity and creativity. Through black and white photography, Kevin eliminates external perceptions and concentrates on the pure state of affairs here and now. His images acquire universal validity, and what is more, for the historical context, he creates an unusually strong trace of the present. It is an interplay of aesthetics, but also the philosophical and sociological aspects of capturing human existence here and now.
It is precisely the street genre of photography that has played its key role in documenting social history and preserving cultural narratives of visual commentary on everyday life. Kevin V. Ton is one of the contemporary photographers who continues in street photography, regardless of current trends. Kevin necessarily works with unpredictability. Almost every day, he unobtrusively wanders the streets of Prague and presents a pure spectacle of contemporary life in Prague with the highest possible moral sensitivity. He gives an insight into diverse images of lived lives through the testimony of the street and quite often specifically touches people on the margins of society. Through his photographs, he tells the stories of people, social communities, often anonymous and unknown. He perceives his environment very well, in which he moves with his camera, and subconsciously feels and anticipates moments, emotions, energy and rhythm of the city that are worth capturing. He depicts the everydayness of busy city panoramas in comparison with quiet, subliminal introspective moments, revealing the complexity of human behavior and their possible reasons. A person is by nature a complex element, soaked in emotions, relationships, culture and personal experience. Authenticity dominates. The best street photographs tell stories without words. Such a photograph itself interprets the meanings conveyed also by the timing of the photograph, which can turn an ordinary scene into a timeless snapshot. Although street photography is increasingly on the edge of current photographic trends today, in its purest form it is still a functional means of expressing the human essence in its relative authenticity. In addition to the aesthetic level, it is primarily necessary to look at street photography from the perspective of ethical aspects. When capturing moments of strong visual stories, the photographer moves on very thin borders. With his instinct, he must sense the situation very well in direct proportion to the discretion of the subject. This concerns the ethics of the creator of the image himself in the form of the absence or minimization of interventions in the image, based on essential trust, but also the entire post-production process, how the image will be handled further. The open approach method plays a key role, when the photographer consciously minimizes his disruption of the given community by maintaining a certain distance and respecting the dignity of his photographed subjects. It seems that Kevin V. Ton is doing well with this discipline. He thereby shifts his artistic photographic element of humanity into the cultural and social context of a valuable document of human experience that we can trust. After all, street photography is still an extraordinary form of memory about the essence of our lives in its purest form. It is still a valid testimony to the charm of the uniqueness of everyday life, to the depth of perception and appreciation of the world in which we live.

The group exhibition Sister of a Sister of a Sister presents the work of fourteen women photographers who make up the first modern female Czech photoclub Sisters in Photography. As the name suggests, mutual support and motivation, cooperation and sharing of the creative process and experimentation is the principal bond between the group’s members. Their work is diverse, thematically rather disconnected. However, in themselves and in their shared purpose, the members bring mutual feminine solidarity into the art milieu of photography which tends to individualism and competition. They pick up the mostly male tradition of photoclubs, which goes back all the way to the beginning of the photographic medium, and following in the footsteps of foreign women photoclubs, they add in the feminist tradition of sisterhood. It is in this spirit and at their creative intersections that the collective wants to present itself in the future.

The fourteen photographers form a collective in which its members retain their autonomy in pursuing feminine as well as other subjects. Even though the former are present in their works somewhat as a matter of course, both the exhibition and the group are not putting themselves under the label of ‘female photography’, and so the feminist optics is only one of the many identities manifested by the club. Each author brings in her own experience, vision, and manner of working. Exploring the exhibition we thus pass through different worlds and perspectives as reflected by the opening text which lets the various characters and motifs from all the photographs speak and invites us to listen.

This exhibition consists of a selection of early photographs created by Jiří Šámal, which were taken during the 1950‘s. The core theme among them is the form and life of the previous Czechoslovak metropolis, which was discovered by the future cameraman while he was still a student at the Production, later Camera, faculty at a Prague university, FAMU. Near his then-student accommodation, so-called ‘faculty dorms’ that are still located on Hradební Street on the edge of Staré Město, Šámal discovered some of the first photographic subjects.

Photography did not solely represent the spontaneous creative need that Jiří Šámal brought to Prague from his childhood in south Moravia. It further highlighted the mandatory part and then the core means of film education, which at first greatly outweighed personal work with a camera. In one of his first collections, Šámal concentrated on themes from ‘Na Františku’ in Prague. Within this ‘district inside a district’, the future photographer and cameraman managed to capture the historic atmosphere of the previous peasant enclave right before it was drastically changed through sanitation interventions and the reconstruction of the grounds of the previous Anežkovský Monastery.

The object of great visual interest for Šámal were the events on Prague’s embankments, which not only represented a place to enjoy oneself, including fishing but also the intense work environment, as can be showcased in the collection ‘Fish Boxes on the Vltava River’. Within the collection, Šámal captured the dynamic of a traditional catch of the South Bohemian Carp, temporarily placed in Vltava. Additional subjects, such as lonely pedestrian on the Town Hall stairs, saleswomen with scales in front of a shop in Melantrichova Street, the delivery of coal on a ladder in now a demolished part of old Žižkov or the automobile Tatraplan driving in front of a two-wheeler in Hradební street add to the perception of the atmosphere of the city during the fifties. In the background of the scenery of the ‘olden times’, which evokes the era of the first republic and the Austrian monarchy, the big city life melts together with a certain abandonment of spaces due to the grip of the communist totality. The unifying point of view on that version of Prague remains its picturesque plasticity, which is further highlighted by the photographer thanks to the help of lighting contrast.

Petr Šámal

(CV) Jiří Šámal (*1934) is primarily a cameraman. He entered the world of film in the Czechoslovak New Wave era. His contribution to this phenomenon, on the one hand, is framed through the collaboration on an internationally awarded graduate’s movie ‘Mouthful’ by the director Jan Němec, on the other hand, is highlighted through his film camera in movies, which after its premiere, or even before its completion, because of its content, moral overlap, or expressive harshness, it was later transported to the vault. This included the movies ‘Shame’ (1967) by director Ladislav Helge and the early works of Hynek Bočan such as ‘Honor and Glory’ (1968) and ‘Juvie Detention’ (1968, finished in 1990). During this era, Jiří Šámal worked also on several other cinematic artworks. He was presented with the Barrandov Trilobite award for ‘Getaway’(1967), directed by Štěpán Skalský, thanks to its mysterious and dark atmosphere he outdid the original literary version initially aimed at children audiences. Additionally, resulting from the previously mentioned factors, we can consider it one of the first Czech ‘road movies’. During this time, Šámal worked as a cameraman on many awarded early television movies, such as ‘How Theatre is Made’ (director Jiřina Pokorná-Makoszová, 1969) or ‘Barometer’ (director Antonín Moskalyk, 1969).

Later, Šámal stood behind the camera while creating a number of films, from which many became well-recognizable for the spectators. The director of many of the them was Antonín Moskalyk (‘Grandmother’, 1971; ‘Third Prince’, 1982; ‘Cuckoo in a Dark Forest’, 1984), with whom he too shot a television series, ‘Panopticon of the City of Prague’ (1987). Other directors that Šámal worked with include Jiří Krejčík, Jaromír Bolek, and Jaroslav Papoušek. Alongside his film career, Jiří Šámal is also a co-author of audiovisual projects and a creator of lighting concepts for many historical monuments (ex. Carevec castle in Bulgaria). Šámal’s artistic qualities were acknowledged by the Czech Cameraman Association, which presented him with a Lifetime’s Achievement Award in 2021. During this year, on the occasion of a lifetime jubilee, Jiří Šámal has received an award from the City of Třebíč, his birthplace, for his contribution to Czech cinematography.

Šámal’s work as a photographer is frequently connected to filming locations. If Šámal wasn’t behind the film camera, he tirelessly captured everything around him, from taking portraits of actors and crew members, to people preparing the scenes. Furthermore, Jiří Šámal also devoted his time to documentary and advertising photography, however, he spent the most of his time photographing for his enjoyment. Therefore, his archive is a treasure chest of themes from cinematography, everyday life, social events, fine arts, and natural and urban scenes.

Jiří Hanke is one of the most important personalities of contemporary Czech photography, not only as a great photographer, but also as a tireless curator, who prepared over 450 exhibitions between 1977 and 2024, and as an organizer of photographic workshops. The most famous of his extensive photographic works are the series People from Podprůhon, about the disappearing traditional way of life of the inhabitants of the old part of Kladno, and Views from the Window of My Flat, in which he for twenty-two years photographed various situations and building modifications in the small space of the square below his apartment, Entrepreneurs, consisting of gently ironic portraits of Kladno’s pioneers of private business, and the portrait series Echoes of a Generation, based on physiognomic and psychological comparisons of parents and their offspring. He has worked on all of them for a long time, but while he has already completed his older works, the Impressions of Generations series spans nearly four decades, and even the current exhibition does not represent its final form.

Compositionally simple photographs with direct views of the subjects into the lens and through it into the eyes of the viewers, and with an important role of the home or work environment, are stylistically loosely related to the iconic works of August Sander. Portraits of celebrity artists and athletes, as well as “ordinary” people, fascinate with the juxtapositions of the physical appearance and sometimes differences in the faces and figures of grandparents, parents, children and grandchildren. But also by the similarities and contrasts of their facial expressions or clothing. Significant details of the environment also play an important role. In contrast to the 1998 book edition of Echoes of a Generation, the current exhibition at Leica Gallery Prague works much more with time, as it includes portraits of the same people and in many cases their children and grandchildren created over decades. On the one hand, it is a picture of the inevitable ageing that marks the faces and bodies of the subjects, but on the other hand, it also shows that the genes of the portrayed are carried on in their descendants. Hanke often makes do with only a few portraits at different time intervals, but four generations of the Povondrovi family are represented in thirty photographs.  He shows that even at the age of eighty, he is still creating works of extraordinary strength in terms of content and visuals. This is illustrated by excerpts from Karel Greif’s new film about Jiří Hanke, which can be seen at the exhibition.

Vladimír Birgus

Jiří Hanke

Born on 15 April 1944 in Kladno, where he still lives. After graduating from the eleven-year high school he started working in the Kladno branch of the State Savings Bank. In his childhood, he took photographs under the influence of his father, but in his youth, he was mainly interested in music (he played guitar in the beat group Barclay and performed solo with his own repertoire) and created collages from magazine clippings. He has been a systematic photographer since 1974, when he became a member of the creative group Ateliér in Kladno. He focuses mainly on large-scale series of documentary and portrait photographs, which are often created over many years. His works have been presented in more than a hundred solo exhibitions and are part of many important collections (e.g. the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, the National Gallery in Prague, the Prague City Gallery, the Moravian Gallery in Brno, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris and the International Center of Photography in New York). His books include Views from the Window of My Flat (1994, 2013), People from Podprůhon (1995), Imprints of a Generation (1998), Other Views (together with Jiřina Hankeová, 2002), Stop Time (2003), Jiří Hanke: Photographs (2008), Kladno Under the Skin (2013), Searching for America (2014) and Kladno Velvet (2029).

In 1977 he founded the Small Gallery in the Savings Bank in Kladno. He held 433 exhibitions there until its closure in 2019.  Since 2019, he has prepared another 20 exhibitions for the Cabinet of Photography at Kladno Castle. In 2011, the Association of Professional Photographers of the Czech Republic awarded him the title of Personality of Czech Photography for Lifetime Achievement, and in 2014 he received the Kladno City Award. His wife Jiřina, son Michael, daughter Lucie and grandsons Dominik and Vojtěch are also devoted to photography.

The Nineties are the summarium of an ambitiously conceived program. Dana Kyndrová, from the start of her career, focused on the photographic recording and eventually publication of testimony on timeless social questions. They embody an authentic realism that represents a wide movement in Czech culture, originally arising in opposition to the realism known as socialist, or in other words the doctrine of official propaganda.

If humanistic photography should wish to capture and transmit knowledge of actual people, it needs to be open not only to its viewers, but equally to its subjects. As a responsible documentarist, Kyndrová understandably respects those who do not wish to be photographed. At the same time, she also finds it unacceptable to create scenes she staged herself and then present the images from the staging as documentation of spontaneous action. Instead, she prefers patience, making informal contact and allowing the photography to take place naturally. And if she has no desire to manipulate with the actors or the viewers, it should be no surprise that she herself intends to remain free of any illusions.

The fall of the Communist regime at the end of 1989 was an event that Kyndrová, as a photographer, had no intention of missing, yet she retained her individualistic standpoint of scepticism towards all mass phenomena. New speakers held forth from new platforms, yet the applauding hands were often the same ones that she saw waving in approval toward the previous regime. In one interview, Kyndrová recalled that over a decade after the revolution, she encountered still in state service – at Prague Castle no less – one secret police officer she had photographed during May Day in 1983, as a security guard for the officials’ stage as the disciplined socialist public stood watching.

And just as the persistence of this particular detail from a Communist-era May Day demands our attention, we can also find in Kyndrová’s photographic cycles further indications of how strongly there resounds, in many different settings, the deformation of Communist ideology and official socialism. Or in parallel, to follow the pendulum of events as they swing towards senseless excesses of bodily liberation, once relieved of totalitarian strictures.

The Nineties does not work to evoke nostalgic moods, but more to provoke thoughtful reflection. For if we are not all situated in agreement upon social matters, then we cannot perceive either the past, or the world itself …

Dana Kyndrová has a sharply outlined view of what she finds interesting, what she expects in a wide range of social circles, and where to go looking for it. She can cast her eye of the lives of her contemporaries, speak with them, and above all photograph them. It springs forth from observation, as well as from her critical evaluation, examining the connections and working towards deriving conclusions… In this way, it seems that she proceeds from subject to subject, in each instance tracking down their characteristics and grasping the respective essences. For this reason as well, The Nineties retains the traditional division into chapters. Yet all the same, the wide range of subject matter, like all parts of the oeuvre, is linked through the author’s own motivations.

Dana Kyndrová is intent on nothing less than human fate. It is a subject that she found quickly in her youth and to which she remains faithful = for well over half a century. This longstanding heritage represents, for her, a challenge that does not let up and cannot be overlooked. Humanity may well intrigue her in the word’s most general sense, yet the medium of photography allows the transmission of, at best, only what people do, what they pay attention to, and how in each case their surroundings look…

Inner life is not to be seen.

Yet all the same, Kyndrová points equally to what remains, by principle, outside the image. However much she gazes at the exterior manifestations, she is not limited to the shaping of individual moments. What makes this possible is the balance between the choice of the shots and the sense for their thematic inclusion into a planned cycle. The author grants her publications the form of a story, a visual literature, as she says – though understood of course as a factual one. In The Nineties, this one-time point of view intersects with the standpoint of mature experience. With the passage of time, the original perspective increases in its drama, offering the transformation of immediate insights into a likeness.

The ninth book by Dana Kyndrová is therefore an expression of her mission, and hence of her personal fate. After all, photography shows not only what it set out for itself; it also points directly toward it.

Josef Moucha, curator

Dear visitors,
please be advised that the photographs in the „Erotic Show“ series (located in the last room) contain sexually explicit imagery. Please take this into consideration when deciding to view these works.

Thank you