Families

"Photography frees me from the pressure that settles on my soul," says Jan Dobrovský, whose series of images from northern Bohemia brings a completely new quality of photographic sensitivity to the Czech landscape. "I can't put into words what it does to me when I see the unexpected tenderness with which a man like a mountain caresses a raging child."

Among the Roma families in Krásná Lípa, Dobrovský first looked for the poetry of raw being, but he found much more there - new friends and an opportunity to repay an old personal debt. And so he began to visit Roma in their homes, during festive moments and at boxing training.

In black-and-white compositions that could only have been taken in an atmosphere of mutual trust, the man with the Leica presents us with an empathetic, luminous imprint of human intimacy and the natural desire to become the hero of one's own life. It is published with a foreword by the author and an afterword by Miroslav Petříček.