Miroslav Martinovský, Exposed time, Novoměstská radnice, 2015

The well-known photo reporter represents a cross-section of his life's work. During his professional life, he went through a number of periodicals and in 1975 he received the 1st prize in the sports category for the film The Last Attempt in the prestigious World Press Photo competition in Amsterdam. A selection of sports images can be seen on the 1st floor of the Gallery in the tower of the New Town Hall, on the second floor he collected unique photographs of Prague taken by the pinhole camera. Other exhibition spaces in the tower feature films for magazines, portraits of celebrities and art photographs

Miroslav Martinovský (1945) has been and is a photojournalist all his life. When he pulls the trigger, it never matters if he's working for an newsroom or a freelancer. He's just taking pictures. For five decades, ordinary things and ordinary people (true, sometimes even extraordinary people and strange things), but in an extraordinary way. He started classically, as a photojournalist - in the daily People's Democracy. After graduating from the Secondary Industrial School of Graphic Arts (1963, Industrial and Applied Photography), where he was influenced by such good teachers as photographer Josef Ehm, photography historian Rudolf Skopec and photographic technology expert Jan Schlemmer, he began working in this newspaper. Of course, he had to take pictures of everything, such is the mission of a photojournalist in a newspaper, but sports became an important point of his interest. The last attempt, with which he won the most important award, also comes from the athletic field: 1st prize in the Sports category in the World Press Photo (1975) competition. The film characterizes what is typical of Martinovsky's photography of the world: to seize from the flow of time a moment that is essential for his understanding - and to be able to find those moments where others do not even lift their eyes, let alone pull the trigger. In the case of The Last Attempt, he did not find that eloquent moment at the Olympics or the World Championships, but at small competitions of children's athletes somewhere in eastern Slovakia.

People's democracy has long since disappeared, as did the weekly Sedmička pionýrů, where Miroslav Martinovský worked from 1968 to 1992, and once the flagship of Czech newspaper journalism Mladý svět, whose photojournalist he spent another five years. He has been a freelance journalist since 1997. However, his photographs, which form the most important part of the Exposed World exhibition, live without any problems, and when they age, in the right way - so that they are a sharp and eloquent image of the time they tell about. A specific part of Martinovský's work are the simplest camera in the world, the pinhole camera. The photographer has been experimenting with formats, constructions and materials here for twenty-five years, looking for the limits of what a barely visible hole replacing a lens can capture. If he wanted to philosophize, he could argue that in this simplicity he was looking for the true root of photographic work, a stone of sage drawing by light, and no doubt there would be enough to take it seriously. He doesn't do it and he knows why - he just takes pictures through that hole. He takes good photos. Like all lenses and like a lifetime.

Jaroslav Veis