Jaroslav Kučera

Jaroslav Kučera (b. 1946) is a documentary photographer, winner of the Personality of Czech Photography award and one of the most distinctive Czech documentary photographers of the past fifty years. He graduated from the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague; he decided to become a photographer in August 1969 in Pankrác prison, where he was locked up for photographing a demonstration against the Soviet occupation. He has been freelance since 1973, in 1990 he co-founded the photography group Signum, and since 1996 he has been a member of the Bilderberg agency.

He won the Czech Press Photo grand prize for 2000 and first prize at the Euro Press Photo Awards, has received more than ten further Czech Press Photo awards over the years, and was the first recipient of the Grant of the Mayor of Prague. His photographs are held in the collections of the International Center of Photography in New York, LIFE magazine, the Moravian Gallery in Brno and Prague City Gallery. He has had more than seventy solo exhibitions from Prague to Berlin and Denver, including the major retrospective How I Met People at Prague Castle, and has published nine books. The Velvet Revolution series, from which this edition comes, was shot in November 1989 on forty rolls of film between Wenceslas Square, the Melantrich building and the Laterna Magika theatre; his picture of Havel and Dubček embracing, from the same series, appeared in the World Press Photo anniversary book, and another of his photographs ran on the cover of LIFE.