Above Eva Fuka’s cradle, two Fates had a dispute. First brought palette and brush, the second, a modern day Fate, held camera.

From 1939 to 1951 she took pictures with Leica, then Rolleiflex and Nikon. She entered the digital era with Canon in hand and have been faithful to it ever since.

Today, without doubt, she ranks between the legendary and pioneering figures of the Czech photography.

She has been taking photographs systematically since 1951. At that time, she and her husband Vladimír Fuka were friends with “subversive elements” Jiří Kolář, Zdeněk Urbánek, Jan Hanč, Emanuel Frynta and Kamil Lhoták, and attracted tireless attention of secret police. Publishing pictures was out of question.

After some years, Eva Fuka’s photographs were allowed into periodicals and after she had been recognised by critics as the most important figure of the new photography, even an exhibition was permitted to her.

In 1963, after 12 years of work, she published a monograph. She was the first woman in Czechoslovakia to be granted that privilege. Taking into consideration the fact that photography was, at the beginning of the sixties, still fighting for recognition as a form of art, her book was probably the first monograph of a woman photographer ever to be published.

In 1967 Eva Fuka emigrated. She continued to take and to restore photographs; she exhibited her works and sculptured. But in Czechoslovakia not a single word could had been uttered about her until 1989. In her home country she did not exist.

After 1990 she returned to the Czech Republic. She had two big exhibitions in 1996 and 2007, plus a few smaller ones. In 2007 a new monograph of Eva Fuka was published by Torst.

Eva Fuka has taken many pictures, but has been making a merciless selection. After 60 years of photographing, her work consists of only a couple of hundreds of pieces.

Aleš Kisil, curator of the exhibition