ABOUT

panak

Born 1963. I started photographing at the age of fourteen, but I would date the moment when I began to photograph fully consciously — knowing what I wanted — to the first half of the 1980s. I moved within the unofficial photographic scene, photographing tramp communities extensively, documenting anti-regime social activities, and collaborating with samizdat editorial offices such as Revolver Revue, Lidové noviny, Sport, and others.

During the 1989 Velvet Revolution, I was nominated by the student agency Radost, founded by classmates from Prague’s FAMU, to photograph the inauguration of the future president Václav Havel. What was meant to be a single day of inauguration photography turned into three intense years of photographing the head of state (December 1989 – July 1992). In the years that followed, I continued to photograph Václav Havel occasionally and with varying intensity until the end of his presidency.

This fundamental theme, which transformed not only my professional life, I processed with long-term distance and later prepared and published at my own expense as the comprehensive book “Václav Havel – Tomki Němec, Photographs.” In the same year, 2016, on the occasion of what would have been his eightieth birthday, I collaborated with the DOX Gallery on the exhibition “HAVEL,” contributing 160 large-format photographs.

From the early 1990s, after the borders opened, I collaborated with the Paris-based photographic agency Agence VU, and from 1992 became a staff photographer for the Anzenberger Agency in Vienna. In the newly free world, I could finally photograph and publish not only in Czechoslovakia. It was a time when reportage and documentary photography still flourished.

I worked with numerous print media, including Libération, Le Monde, Paris Match, Stern, Der Spiegel, DU, GEO, Die Zeit, Focus, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times Magazine, News, and many others. Fueled by youth and by the fact that the world had suddenly opened to my generation, eager to push boundaries, I received several awards, including recognition from the World Press Photo competition (1991, 1994), as well as grants from KulturKontakt Austria, Pro Helvetia, IVO, CPP, among others.

In the Czech Republic and in the new era, I collaborated with numerous editorial teams, book publishers, periodicals, non-profit organizations, and photographed for foundations working with people with disabilities, among other projects. From magazines, I would particularly like to mention the weekly Respekt, with which my collaboration began back in its samizdat days, when it was still published under the name Sport.

In 2018, I took part in the founding and activities of the photographers’ association 400ASA, of which I was a member until 2020. My most recent long-term project, created during the COVID period of 2020–2022, was a collaboration with director Viktor Tauš on the project and publication “Amerikánka, etc.”

I dedicate myself to photography as I always dreamed — being free and independent in my decisions, bearing full responsibility for my actions, and not having to photograph subjects that do not truly interest me.

Photography critic Josef Chuchma wrote the following in my book published by Fototorst:

“The subject of Tomki Němec’s work and free artistic creation is almost always the ‘ordinary’ person in everyday situations, unfolding within the context of their time.”

In 2024–2025, I would like to publish, at my own expense, a photographic book titled “Karel Schwarzenberg” — a tribute to a person and a friend I deeply admired.

I wish you all the very best.