Jiří Turek

Jiri Turek was born in Prague in 1965. His professional career in photography started at MF Dnes in 1990. Parallel to his photojournalism career, he documented foreign visits of the Czech President Vaclav Havel. He also covered war conflicts in former Yugoslavia, Georgia and former Soviet satellites.

Later, he focused on the genre of portrait and fashion photography. His perception of a person as an individual and his ability to uncover interesting connections in portraits brought him accreditation to the Oscars film festival in Los Angeles, the Cannes film festival and Formula 1 races.

In 1998 he became am independent photographer. For his portrait series he became a sought out photographer of celebrities and personal life of pop music and fashion industry. He has also photographed The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Luciana Pavarotti, Lou Reed, Sting and many others.

He has made extensive visual campaigns for magazines such as Elle, Premiere and Maxim. He photographs front-pages, conducts interviews with celebrities complemented by a portrait line, and introduces fashion collections. A no less interesting and compelling part of his work is CD labels. He has made more than 30 labels for Sony Music, Universal Music and EMI.

Among his other clients are: Škoda Auto, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Finlandia Vodka, Warner Music, Armani, GM Opel, Allianz, Raiffaisen Bank, Jablonex and many others.

In the period from 2002 to 2006, he worked in New York and cooperated with Elle, Oyster Magazine, ZINK Magazine, Maxim and many more. He focuses on independent work and primarily reports on New York and the USA. Today, besides commercial work, he intensively focuses on collections from European cities, which was partly exhibited in the LECIA Gallery in Prague from June to September 2008.

In his independent work, besides photographing cities, he focuses on fashion photography, where he very soon became one of the most respected Czech photographers. At the end of 2006 and 2007, his work was displayed in the prestigeous LEICA Gallery in New York for two months. Two compelling series were presented, which blended together the images on fashion and NYC, which were created during his four-year stay in this metropolis. Since his return to the Czech Republic, Jiri Turek has worked as an independent photographer focused on demanding commissions from prestigous fashion and social magazines. The overview of his personal work was exhibited in Prague’s gallery LEICA in 2008.