I still have a clear memory of a very simple camera that got into my hands when I was about ten. I was fascinated by the view through the optically highly imperfect viewfinder – it was like looking into a different world, a world of strange imagination, enigmatic and unattainable, a world with an unreal perspective – strangely distanced in a way… You should’ve seen my disappointment when we picked up the pictures at the laboratory and nothing of what I naively anticipated appeared in them!
Photography stopped interesting me.
I managed to fulfill my childhood dream only many years later and this time I saw in a technically perfect viewfinder the rudiments of that mysterious and magical world.
From the very start I developed my photographs myself, a great help to me being the advice of photography enthusiasts from my hometown of Hodonin. I fondly recall Professor Vladimir Mlcak among others. Thereafter my path quite logically led on to the Film and TV Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, from which I graduated as an external student in 1975. At the entrance exams I also submitted my paintings, which perhaps helped me to be admitted more than my technically not very accomplished photographs.