Josef Moucha
1956, Hradec Králové

He graduated in journalism from Charles University in Prague (1975–1980). Most frequently, he published his works in journals Literární noviny, Host, Ateliér. Since 1980 he has organized a number of personal and group exhibitions. Towards the end of the 1980s, he cofounded the civil association the Aktiv of Free Photography (today FotoForum Praha), and in 1991 the Prague House of Photography Gallery. He participated in various theoretical and practical projects, among others, with a team of authors, in the anthology Alternative Culture: The Story of the Czech Society 1945–1989 (2001), he markedly contributed to a comprehensive catalogue the Photogenicity of Identity / Memory of the Czech Photography (2006). Separately, he published essays on the History of Photography, and technical pictures the Arena Experience (2004) and a fictitious story of a deserter in By the Way  (2004).  Since the middle of the 90s he has been engaged in a freelance occupation.

Adolf Zika wrote about Tereza z Davle:

… in her latest author´s project named the Grandhotel, she has unfolded a hotel theme in the intimate nude field. Do not let be perplexed yourselves by the primarily trivial sonority of this subject matter. The Hotel is an embodiment of intimate atmosphere, symbol of a quiet haven, and a welcome lovers´ hideaway. The Hotel is both a woman´s embrace and a lap. The Hotel is an analogy to any adventure, eroticism, and alluring mystique.

Therefore, in Tereza´s photos, we are watched, seduced, we dwell upon the women´s suave beauty with delight and are caressed by their sensual glamour of the first republic. The very walls of the Hotel Evropa, soaked with their funhouse tarnished glory, are the narrator of life stories that are hiding behind the charismatic glimpses of the ladies and girls. In the course of time, an extraordinary hotel becomes a legend in the same way as a woman´s body, which has been a legend since long ago. It is an axis around which the whole universe revolves.

Tereza of Davle has taken full advantage of her theme. In the straightforward simplicity lie the magic and grace of her snapshots, not only thanks to the use of an analog camera and the consequent manual enlargement of each shot, which the authoress undoubtedly masters with skill, but, above all, thanks to her sense of sight.

The whole curator text about the exhibition is HERE

Tereza z Davle was born in Hořice in 1975. In photography, she is an autodidact, she learns from books, and from her colleagues mainly through her own work. Perfect technique is neither her aim nor a means of expression. On the contrary, in imperfection (blurred snapshots, photos with large grain) she can see greater magic and bigger possibility to capture the authentic atmosphere than in perfect, but bleak shots. It corresponds with her approach to the technique: she rarely uses it in her work – tripod, only when it is really necessary, and she never works with camera flash of the professionals. As she says, she does not take the light to the fashion models, but brings the models to the light.

She takes black-and-white photos with Canon and Pentax 6×7 analog cameras. Then, she enlarges her photos herself. Backwardness and demandingness of the manual enlarging have diverted most photographers to the digital camera, but to her it still makes sense. That “sloshing in the developer”, as she denotes those hours spent in the darkroom, gives her photos that glamour, of, at the first sight, unmistakable hand-made enlargements.

Tereza z Davle prefers naturalness – both in the selection of light conditions and her models. She takes photos of her female friends, neighbours, and young ladies who do not get around the world of modelling, but have something nice in them, which Tereza is able to perceive – be it the body, or a part of it (legs, hair, bosom), or the ability of a natural countenance.

Antonin is a founder of the VII photo agency.
As photojournalists go, Antonin Kratochvil has sunk his teeth into his fair share of upheaval and human catastrophes whilst going about his documentation of the time in which he lives.
As people go, Kratochvil’s own refugee life has been much in the way the same as what he has rendered on film. Kratochvil’s unique style of photography is the product of personal experience, intimate conditioning and not privileged voyeurism.
Over the years his fluid and unconventional work has been sought by numerous publications stretching across widely differing interests. From shooting Mongolia’s street children for the magazine published by the Museum of Natural History to a portrait session with David Bowie for Detour, from covering the war in Iraq for Fortune Magazine to shooting Deborah Harry for a national advertising campaign for the American Civil Liberties Union, Kratochvil’s ability to see through and into his subjects and show immutable truth has made his pictures not facsimiles but uncensored visions.
And yet, what set his kind apart from the many is his consistency and struggle to carry on.
For Kratochvil this fact comes in the form of his numerous awards, grants and honorable mentions dating back to 1975. The latest of these are his two, first place prizes at the 2002 World Press Photo Awards in the categories of general news and nature and the environment.
The next is the 2004 grant from Aperture publishing for Kratochvil’s study on the fractious relationship between American civil liberties and the newly formed Homeland Security since the World Trade Center bombings.

In addition, Kratochvil’s fifth book Vanishing was presented in April 2005 and marks another significant milestone for the craft to which he belongs.
Vanishing represents a collection of natural and human phenomena that on the verge of extinction. What makes this book so innovative is the twenty years it has taken to produce, making it not onlyhistorical from the onset, but a labor of love and a commitment to one man’s conscience.
Education:
* Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography, Gerrit Rietveltd Art Academy, Amsterdam, Holland.
Awards:
* 1991 Infinity Award: Photojournalist of the Year, InternationalCenter of Photography, New York.
* 1994 Leica Medal of Excellence for outstanding achievement indocumentary photography.
* 1994 Dorothy Lange Prize, Duke University Center of documentary Studies.
* 1995 Ernst Haas Award, Maine Photographic workshops.
* 1997 Gold Medal for Photography from Society of Publishing Designers, New York.
* 1997 First Prize, World Press Photo Portrait Series, Amsterdam.
* 1997 (Eissie) Alfred Eisenstadt Award for 3Eyewitness Essay2 Life Magazine.
* 2000 Gold ARC Award for Best Annual Report, NGO Category, for Rockefeller Foundation 1999 Annual Report.
* 2003 First Prize World Press Photo Amsterdam (2 awards same year)
* Medal from the City of Prague for Photography awarded by the Mayor of Prague
* 2005 Lucie Awardfor Outstanding Achievement in Photojournalism
* 2005 Golden Light Award for Best Documentary Book for the book Vanishing

Books:
* Broken Dream: 20 Years of War in Eastern Europe
Monacelli Press, New York 1997.
* Antonin Kratochvil
Torst 2003
* Incognito
Arena Editions, USA 2001
* Supravvivere
Motta Editore, Italy 2001
* Vanishing
de.MO 2005

The exhibition „Photographers of the War“ is a continuation of a breakthrough project „Through the World War I on Foot“ that was exhibited at the Prague Castle in 2009. The response to the project was unusual. Almost fifty people who own photographs, negatives, photographic plates, and even three-dimensional objects such as uniforms, eating utensils, diaries and others, responded to the advertisements with an appeal to track down further photos. The result is an exhibition of four, quite unknown soldiers – photographers who, in the fields of the World War I documented the ordinary everyday life in order to leave a testimony of that cruel time.

Documentarist Jaroslav Kučera will speak both about the compilation of the exhibition and the fate of the soldiers – photographers: Jan Neubert, Jan Rajman of Rožďalovice, Gustav Brož and Jan Myšička, whose photos were provided by their relatives or friends. After the war, following the disintegration of Austria-Hungary and the emergence of the new state of Czechoslovakia, namely until the year 1989, there was no interest in their testimony. The negatives and photographs were covered by dust in the museums and lofts, so only today, thanks to providence of the family members, we are able, almost step by step, to observe their  fate during the hardship of that senseless war.

The exhibition at the Theresian Wing  of the Old Royal Palace of the Prague Castle will take place from 29 April to 4 September 2011.

On Monday, October 8th, 2012 at 7 p.m.
The discussion is free of charge; reservation required (e-mail: ik@lgp.cz)

“… Although Erml‘s artistic creations from the second half of his life looked at many different subjects, within the now fulfilled oeuvre of Jiří  George Erml, the New York bars from the 1990s represent a uniform whole that, almost paradoxically, brings together the two main sources of his work. It would of course be overly simplistic to reduce the characteristics of his work to this series – and yet, with the benefit of hindsight, his bars represent a kind of sum of his visual style, the culmination of his search, unfortunately including the tragic attributes and personal isolation that bars represented in his life. The interior of New York’s bars and the community of people that visit them presented Erml with stylish, original spaces, a preserved morphology of objects and their ubiquitous and never-ending circulation, so inimitably magical in the bars’ changing light and half-darkened spaces.

… Probably nowhere else does a newcomer experience such an intense sense of being a stranger or outsider, and nowhere else will he lose this sense of exclusion so quickly. This labyrinth of emotions naturally depends on the man behind the bar, the way he speaks, his body language. It is up to him whether the space we are entering is just another image, or whether it is transformed into a place that, for a time, becomes our miniature world – just as the line of the bar forms a kind of border, a border between our uncertainty and trust, between a closed world and the possibility of entering into it. The pause after which the bartender offers the possibility of crossing the boundary is one of his trademark privileges, and of course a part of his character….”

Jiří Turek was born in Prague in 1965. Turek studied at the Institute of Graphic Photography and he started his professional career in 1990 as a photojournalist for MFDnes. As a reporter he accompanied president Havel all over the world and reported on the course of wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in the republics of the former Soviet Union. In 1995 he became the editor of the MFDnes magazine and specialized in portrait and fashion photography.

Since 1998 he has been a freelance photographer. He has portrayed world mu- sic icons such as e.g. Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Luciano Pavarotti, Lou Reed, Sting and many others. He has photographed front pages, fashion editorials and created CD covers for music publishers. He is also well-known thanks to his photographs for great advertising campaigns.

Jiří Turek also devotes himself to pedagogical work. He taught at Silesian University and now he conducts photography workshops, which are set up by Leica Gallery Prague, or South Moravia Photoworkshop Association, of which he is a co-founder.

From 2002 to 2006 he lived and worked in New York, where he continued with his work for magazines and publicity. Here he applied himself to free creation, in which he returns to original reportage principles and black-and-white photography. He works with a number of “forgotten” techniques, above all with “lithprints” technology.

In 2006 he exhibited his work in the prestigious Leica Gallery New York. It concerned a collection of emotive reportages from New York, and “a fashion on the verge of nudity”. This exhibition was followed up by another one at the Leica Gallery Prague in 2008, and subsequently by another exposition in the Habitat Centre in New Delhi in India.

At present, Jiří Turek takes photographs of art reportages from various cities of the world, which he concisely named as cityLAB. Paris, London, Berlin, Vienna, Amsterdam – they are the places where he takes photos of people in the streets, where he tries to capture the atmosphere of the city, and desires that this photograph should address and recall these known places, respective emotions and enjoyments linked to them.

The part of text about Jiří Jiroutek’s portrait project, written by Richard Drury:

V rámci sbírek olomouckého Muzea umění patří kolekce fotografie k těm mladším. Systematickému sběratelství fotografie se instituce věnuje od 60. let minulého století a v současnosti soustřeďuje více než sedm tisíc exponátů z různých časových i stylových období.
The unique photographic collection of the Olomouc Museum involves more than 7000 works. Štěpánka Bieleszová will acquaint participants of the Monday discussion with the most valuable of them.
On Monday, November 26, 2012 at 7 p.m.
The discussion is free of charge; reservation required (Ivana Kubičková, e-mail: ik@lgp.cz)

Discussion with Eva Fuka about her work and the exhibition Fabulation will be held on Monday, February 25th, 2013 at 7 p.m. at Leica Gallery Prague. The discussion is free of charge; reservation required on lgp@lgp.cz.

The exhibition Romantic Construct follows the installation, performance and, to a certain extent, the subversive trends in contemporary photography that evoke references to the Romantic tradition. The curatorial approach focuses on artistic and social strategies applied to a Romantic perception of nature of the home. The presented artists remix Romantic forms in a wide variety of ways; they utilise artistic strategies as the master copy for perceiving a personal space – the home idyll, or they transfer these strategies to perceive a remote space – a landscape that we don’t inhabit, but are entering and that we surely know from the accumulation of visual images. In many cases they also playfully probe the essence of sculpture and performance; they create their aesthetic forms for the camera’s viewfinder. In addition, forms of re-cataloguing, remixing of the visual tradition and classification systems appear in their work. We observe this in three mutually pervading themes leading from the home idyll and their Romantic rituals, to a Romantic reminiscence in experiencing nature, to performances for the camera that reconstruct nature and apply artistic and social strategies to it.

Jan Adriaans, Netherlands

Melanie Bonajo, Netherlands

Amira Fritz, Germany

Sanna Kannisto, Finlandia

Matthieu Lavanchy, Switzerland

Kamila Musilová, Czech Republic

Bára Přidalová, Czech Republic

Yan Renelt – Kryštof Kalina, Czech Republic

Jaap Scheeren, Netherlands

Diana Scherer, Netherlands

Michaela Thelenová, Czech Republic

Martin Tůma, Czech Republic

Tomáš Werner, Slovakia

Henk Wildschut, Netherlands

Magda Wunsche, Poland