Before the collective 400 ASA was formed, three of its future members—Karel Cudlín, Antonín Kratochvíl, and Jan Mihaliček—photographed Nagorno-Karabakh. A country that no longer exists. Each of them arrived at a different time, in a different place, under different circumstances.
Karel Cudlín captured, in his characteristically empathetic manner, the Armenian inhabitants of Karabakh striving to live their everyday lives in the mountains during a period of relative calm, around 2008. His photographs depict recurring, timeless moments of village life: baking bread, tending livestock. The works presented in the exhibition are his most recent.

Antonín Kratochvíl, one of the most internationally renowned photographers documenting crisis situations, recorded the lives of ethnic Azerbaijanis shortly before the turn of the millennium for UNHCR, following their exodus from villages in Karabakh that had come under Armenian control. He photographed large groups of displaced people living their daily lives in makeshift homes—abandoned freight wagons. Among his images is that of a small sapling, planted and tended daily by its caretaker, who hopes one day to die in its shade, having been forced to leave behind the mature trees of his former home.
The earliest photographs were taken by Jan Mihaliček in 1992, during the period of the so-called First War. He arrived in the remote mountain enclave with the first mission of the Lidové noviny Foundation, titled SOS Karabakh. They brought medicine, food, and, among other things, a field hospital. All of this needed to be documented and published in the press. This humanitarian effort was followed by others— there was no way to simply stop. Over time, this led to the creation of an organization now widely known as People in Need. For Mihaliček, then twenty-seven years old, those few days became a defining experience that fundamentally changed his view of the world. His lens captured refugees, partisans defending their villages, soldiers at the front, and the dead—together forming a stark image of the terror and despair brought by war.
Across the works of these three photographers—friends as well as witnesses—we see the horrors of war, the plight of refugees, but also the fragile process of post-war recovery in rare moments of calm. The exhibition speaks of a beautiful and deeply scarred land, of the futility of war, and above all of its greatest victims: ordinary people.

A book of the same title, based on the exhibited photographs, is currently in preparation. We would be grateful for your support in bringing it to life via www.donio.cz. Thank you.

Jan Mihaliček

(CV) Karel Cudlín (*1960) is a leading Czech documentary photographer and a professor at FAMU. He is known for his focus on everyday life, Roma communities, and his intimate photographs of Prague’s Žižkov district. Between 1997 and 2003, he served as one of the official photographers of President Václav Havel. He is a sixteen-time recipient of the Czech Press Photo award and a member of the 400 ASA collective.

(CV) Antonín Kratochvíl (*1947) is an internationally acclaimed Czech photographer and photojournalist, co-founder of the VII Photo Agency and recipient of the World Press Photo award. He is known for his dramatic war reportage and introspective portraits of prominent figures (including David Bowie and Willem Dafoe). He studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and is a member of the 400 ASA collective.

(CV) Jan Mihaliček (*1965) is a Czech documentary photographer whose career began before 1989, photographing the skateboarding community and collaborating with samizdat publications. From December 1989, he worked as a photojournalist for Lidové noviny, covering war conflicts in Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, and Nagorno-Karabakh. In 1997, he received first prize at Czech Press Photo for his reportage on the flooded city of Ostrava. Today, he works as a freelance photographer and cameraman, focusing on social themes and classical black-and-white documentary photography in the tradition of humanist photography. He is a member of the 400 ASA collective.