Antonín Kratochvíl

Antonin Kratochvil is an independent photographer. He studied under Geritt Rieveld at the Academy of Fine Arts in Holand. In 1972 he became a member of the Photographers Association BFA. Antonin Kratocvil’s works are internationally recognized and are often to be seen in The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times and in magazines such as: Newsweek, Esquire, The Smithsonian, Mother Jones, Rolling Stones, German Geo, Conde Nast Traveler, Granta, American and French Photo, Zoom, Photographies, Creative Camera and Camera Switzerland.

He has presented exhibitions in Milan, Munich, Cologne, Prague, Houston, New York, Perpignan and many other cities.

His work is on display at the Bibliotheque Nationale gallery in Paris, and in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Arts.

In 1991 A. Kratochvil received the Journalist of the Year award, a unique honor, from the International Center of Photography in New York. He also received an honorary medal – LEICA, for outstanding achievement in documentary photography and a donation from the Mother Jones Fund 1994. In 1955, he received a prize from the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylo Documentary Study Centre at Duke University.
In the last twenty-five years A. Kratochvil has published the coming of war – Afghanistan and Rwanda, the street children of Guatemala and Mongolia, refugees from Tibet, the life in Havana, portraits of Beijing and Shanghai, mining in Bolivia, cholera in Ecuador, enormous water disaster in Amazonia and medical help for native Americans in American reservation. At the end of 1997 Antonin Kratochvil first made a public monograph about his twenty-year work in Eastern Europe under the title Broken Dreams.

Antonin Kratochvil has been living in New York for several years; it is, however, difficult to catch him at home, where he is surrounded by his family and the relative safety of a big city. His work as a photojournalist forces him on never-ending travels on all continents. Often, he leaves the most developed economy of the world, to paradoxically search for places of tragic poverty and sorrow. Even at the beginning of his life in the USA, he felt depraved, a nostalgia for total grey behind the iron curtain and traveled to Poland, Hungary, USSR and Romania, so he could present the photographs of the deformed and devastated East to the prosperous inward-looking people of the West. He saw Czechoslovakia only in the 80s and he didn’t miss the moment in 1989, when the true destruction of barbed wire on the Western border occurred. Already during these visits, children’s sorrow and deprival became a central theme. In 1984, with the help of the magazine Parenting, he decided to work on a documentary series unhindered by the borders of the iron curtain. The magazine created a special section under the name “Child Watch”, where he regularly contributed photographs from various conflicts, famines and catastrophes resulting from changes in post-communist countries. As everything that requires courage, embattlement and empathy, Antonin Kratochvil accepted his mission with unbelievable conviction and readiness. However, he does not have any illusions that his presence in these places can bring fast and effective help to those who suffer. He has become a patient observer who hopes his work is published widely in world press and will affect the conscience of the reader and influence the experience of individual civil attitudes. It is a long and slow path, which takes several generations that achieves this goal.