His aim wasn’t to capture the war. Despite that, or possibly because of that, Turek’s photographs are the truest and rawest insight into the lives of people who didn’t choose war yet live within it. Ordinary people. The photographs are filled with emotion, fear, barebone life, everydayness, and guilt in the eyes of every person who was lucky enough to wake up alive that morning in Kabul. Photographs of children who grew up too fast for them to still have mischievous or youthful grins. Photographs of boys who are letting out their emotions playing football. Images of women whose faces we rarely get to see, images of men who don’t have time to spare for happiness. Soldiers and quirky grandfathers…

“Every day I was truly pleased with the photographs I created, yet the pleasure was mixed with sadness over what I witnessed that day. Kabul was ravaged by war at the time, but people had different things to worry about, ordinary things. They needed food, drink, and heat. That was and is my message from Kabul: ‘Even here people live’,” says the photographer Jiri Turek.

Despite the photographs being created in 2011, the twenty large-format photographs of Kabul’s inhabitants resonate nowadays more than ever.

Karolina Kovarova

Jiri Turek (*3. 5. 1965) has been concentrating on his freelance work for the past 30 years during which he gained an immense amount of experience as well as insight, precision, and perfect photography technique. In addition to his portrait, reportage, and commercial photography work Turek is returning to the original craft of black and white photography by exploring certain “forgotten” techniques such as the “lithprint”. He creates cover pages for prestigious magazines and fashion editorials, as well as for CD covers. Turek is also well known for his photographical contributions to successful marketing campaigns.

(www.jiriturek.com)