Antonín Kratochvíl

About this book

This retrospective exhibition of the Czech photographer Antonín Kratochvíl presents a cross-section of a highly expressive, suggestive photographic oeuvre by one of the world's most prominent and significant producers of social documentary photography and photojournalism on the nature of contemporary human society. He affects our emotions, upsets us, transforms images with sophisticated effects, and dispenses an exact dosage of the intended resonance of the labyrinth of the forms humanity and its averted faces. Kratochvíl's photographs accentuate images of deprivation, despair, alienation, pain, sadness and misery, as well as the arrogance of power and its consequences in various parts of the world. They present historical evidence of modern social and civilization problems of the world and military conflicts (Afghanistan, Bosnia, the Philippines, Haiti, Iraq, Rwanda, Zaire) and capture the tragedy of humanitarian and natural disasters or the escalated social problems of human society as such (epidemics, disappearing cultures, devastation of the landscape, the criminality of drug dealers, and an insight into the lives of contemporary 'golden youth' in Moscow).