Born in Vsetín, Czech Republic in 1946; graduated from the Faculty of Education of Palacky University in Olomouc (major in Art Education, 1967). He took up photography while he was still a student there. In 1977, he graduated from the School of Artistic Photography in Brno. In 2000, he received a post-doctoral degree at the Faculty of Film and Television at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where he was a lecturer and specialist in Photography. He is currently employed as an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Creative Photography of Silesian University in Opava and the Department of Photography at the Faculty of Film and Television at Prague’s famous Academy of Performing Arts (AMU). One of the most important contemporary Czech photographers and one of the most outstanding representatives of Czech culture. In 1982 he took part in an exhibition in Prague which was prohibited by the authorities and was consequently arrested. The reason for the arrest was that some of his pictures were interpreted as defaming the state and its representatives. In the 1990s a radical change occurred. The persecuted photographer became almost a cult figure of Czech culture and an academic lecturer. He began photographing around the world, but his artistic style did not change. He continued discovering ordinary people who despite many differences still remained similar to the main subjects of his photographs from the borderland between Poland and the Czech Republic. He worked on documentary projects in France, England, Austria, Germany, Japan, China, Russia, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Since 1997 he has run a gallery in Bruntál. He has had over 700 solo exhibitions. He has also been a contributor to many others and published a total of 21 books. His works can be found in some of the world’s major collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery in Washington, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne.